Origin

— III — HOMINIDS

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Manekato lingered on the threshold of the room, held back by a mixture of respect and dread.

Her mother, Nekatopo, was dying.

Nekatopo, breathing evenly, gazed at the soft-glowing ceiling. A slim Worker waited beside the bed for her commands, as still as a polished rock.

Nekatopo’s room was a hexagonal chamber whose form was the basis of the design of the House, indeed of the Farm itself. This room had been occupied by matriarchs throughout the deep history of the Lineage, and so it was Nekatopo’s now — and would be Manekato’s soon. But the room was stark. The ceiling was tall and the walls bare panels, glowing softly pink. The only piece of furniture was the bed on which Nekatopo lay, itself hexagonal.

Manekato remembered how her grandmother had decorated these same walls with exuberant fruits. But her daughter had stripped away all of that. “I honour my mother’s memory,” she had said. “But these walls are of Adjusted Space; they are not material. They do not tarnish or erode. They have a beauty beyond space and time, as our ancestors intended. Why deface them with transience?…”

But Manekato found the unreal simplicity as overwhelming, in its way, as the happy clutter of her grandmother. When this room was hers, Manekato would find a middle way: her own way, as all the matriarchs had done — and she felt a sudden flush of shame, for her mother was not yet dead, and here she was calculating how she would use her room.

Now she saw that salty tears leaked over Nekatopo’s cheeks, soaking the sparse hair, and trickled into her flat nose.

Manekato was troubled to her core. Her mother had never cried — not even on hearing the news of her imminent death — not even on the day when she had had to send away her only son, Babo, Mapping him to his marriage on a Farm on the other side of the world.

Manekato fled, hoping her mother had not noticed she had been here.

She walked alone, along the path that led to the ocean. The Wind was gentle today, comparatively; she was barely aware of the way it ruffled the thick black hair on her back, and shivered over the trees that clung to the ground nearby.

To a human she would have looked something like a gorilla: stocky, powerful, all of eight feet tall, she knuckle-walked elegantly. She pressed her knuckles into the crushed gravel of the path with gentleness, even reverence. Every speck of land on the Farm was precious to her, like an extension of her own heart. Even this humble path served its purpose with quiet dignity, and had borne the weight of her mother and her mother’s mother, deep into the roots of time, as it bore her weight now.

Quiet dignity, she thought. That is what I must strive for, in the difficult days ahead.

The path ended at a shallow cliff top that overlooked the sea. The sea was grey and cloudy, laden with silt, and tall waves, generated by a storm raging far over the horizon, crashed with exorbitant violence on the heavily eroded shore. Manekato glimpsed the rectangular gridwork that covered the ocean floor — the boundary of the undersea Farms — a shining mesh that disappeared into the murk of the cloudy water.

The tides were shallow on this moonless Earth, so the beach was narrow and battered by waves. But still huge birds plummeted from the sky, their muscular wings folded, stabbing after the unwary fish and crabs who clung to life at this thin, inhospitable margin. Manekato swivelled her ears to hear the calls of the birds, deep-pitched and throaty to penetrate the unceasing roar of the Wind.

Manekato turned and looked back the way she had come, resting her weight easily on her knuckles. The Farm sprawled over a low hill — in fact it was the core of a volcano, Wind-eroded to a snub long before her Lineage had begun to work this land. The Farm was dominated by the low, streamlined House that sat at the crest of the hill, its prow facing the direction of the prevailing Wind like a beached ship. Around the House sprawled a glowing gridwork of light, in the hexagonal pattern that was the signature of the Poka Lineage. Each of the fields marked out by the grid bore a different crop, ranging from the most advanced self recursive Worker designs — even from here she could see nubs of heads and stubby limbs pushing out of the ground — all the way back to the Lineage’s first harvest, a fat-trunked, ground-hugging willow whose bark still provided some of the best tea available anywhere.

But the land itself was only a cross-section of the greater Farm. There were more cultivated layers stacked deep beneath her feet, fed by light piped from the surface, and mines for the water and hydrocarbons locked in the ground’s deeper rocks, and even one mighty borehole that punched through the planet’s crust and into the mantle, sipping at Earth’s core heat. There were more ducts that pumped heat and carbon dioxide and other waste products back into the ground, of course, as the Poka Lineage contributed to the husbandry of the world.

Even above the ground the Farm’s activities extended. Manekato could see engineered birds wheeling over the main House, snapping Wind-blown debris from the sky. The birds were restricted to the Farm’s perimeter, and Manekato could see how they flocked in a great wedge-shaped slice of sky that projected up from the ground, so high that the uppermost birds were mere dots against the banded, rippling clouds that were the province of the Sky Farmers.

From the core of the Earth to the bellies of the clouds: that was the extent of the Poka Farm, every scrap of it worked and reworked, every speck of dirt, every molecule of air and water functional, every bacterium and insect and animal and bird with a well-designed role to play in the managed ecology.

There was not a patch of this world that was not similarly cultivated, cherished by its Lineage.

And the Farm would soon belong to Manekato, all of it — even though she was just eight years old: still a young adult, little more than a third of her life gone.

Even though she didn’t want it.

Now Manekato heard a faint cry. She swivelled her parabolic ears towards the House, and picked out the voice of her mother, calling her name.

She hurried up the path, back sloping, powerful legs working, levering herself forward on her knuckles. As she passed, immature Workers called out to her, tinny voices piping from ill-formed mouths, already seeking to serve; and willow leaves swivelled frantically in her shadow as they strove to drink in all the light of the eight-hour day.

She returned to her mother’s room, at the heart of the Farm. Unhappily she stepped forward, approaching the bed.

Her mother’s bed looked like a simple hexagonal nest, woven of leafy branches. It was in fact a cluster of semi-sentient Workers, designed to mimic the nests of willow and birch branches that children learned to make for themselves from an early age. It had been manufactured to Manekato’s design by Worker artisans, twelve generations removed from the crude self-recursive creatures budding in the fields outside.

The floor of the room was a pit filled with hard-compacted white dust. The dust was the ground-up bones of her ancestors. One day Nekatopo’s bones would be added to the pit, and, not many years after that, Manekato’s too. Nobody knew how deep the dust pit extended. Manekato could feel the soft grittiness of the dust, but not a gram of it clung to her feet.

Nekatopo opened her eyes.

“…Mother?”

“Oh, Mane, Mane.” It was a childish diminutive she had not used since Manekato was a baby. She reached up, her great arms withered and weak.

Manekato embraced her, feeling the tears soak into the hairs in her own chest.

“Oh, Mane, I’m so sorry. But you must go to the Market.”

Manekato frowned. She knew that no woman had travelled to the Market since her grandmother’s day. Manekato herself had never left the boundary of the Farm, and the prospect of travelling so far filled her with dread. “Why?”

Nekatopo struggled to sit up, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. We are going to lose the Farm.”

Manekato felt her mouth fall open. A change in the possession of a Farm occurred only when a Lineage became extinct, or when some member of a Lineage had committed a grave crime.

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. Oh dear, dear Mane! It is the Astrologers. They have news for us which — well, it has gone around and around in my head, like the Astrologers” own wretched stars wheeling around the world. The Farm is to be destroyed. A great catastrophe is to befall the world — so say the Astrologers.”

Manekato could not take in any of this. “Storms can be averted, waves tamed—”

“You must believe the Astrologers,” Nekatopo whispered, insistent. “I’m sorry, Manekato. You must go to the Market and meet them.”

Manekato pulled away from her frail mother, frightened, resentful. “Why? If all this is true, what use is talk?”

“Go to them,” Nekatopo sighed, subsiding back into the arms of the semi-sentient branches.

Manekato walked to the door. Then — torn by shock, uncertainty, shame, doubt she hesitated. “Nekatopo — if the Farm dies — what will become of me?”

Nekatopo lay on her bed, a dark brown bundle, breathing softly. She did not reply — but Manekato knew there was only one possible answer. If the Farm died, then the Lineage must die with it.

She burned with confusion, resentment.

But still she hesitated. It struck her that whatever the fate of the Farm, if she travelled to the Market, her mother might not be able to welcome her home again.

So, softly, she began to recite her true name. “Manekatopokane-mahedo…”

Manekato’s true name consisted of nearly fifty thousand syllables — one syllable more than her mother’s name, two more than her grandmother’s — one syllable added for each generation of the Lineage, back to the beginning, when members of a very different species, led by a matriarch called Ka, and her daughter called Poka, had first scratched at the unpromising slopes of the eroded hills here.

Manekato’s people had farmed this scrap of land for fifty thousand generations, for more than a million years.

Nekatopo listened to this child-like performance, unmoving, but Manekato sensed her wistful pleasure.

Joshua:

Joshua crouched by a bubbling stream. His nostrils were filled by the musky smell of the hunters” skins, the soft green scent of grass.

The giant horse had become separated from its herd. It snorted, stamping a leg that seemed a little lame. Forgetting its peril in the foolish way of all horses, it nibbled at grass.

The Ham hunters crept forward. Most of them were men. There was no cover, here on the open plain, but they hunkered down in the long grass, and the drab brown skins they wore helped them blend into the background. They were patient. They worked towards the horse step by silent step, staying resolutely downwind of the animal. Lame or not, the heavy old stallion could still outrun any of them-or punish them with its hooves should they fail to trap it properly.

This small drama took place on a plain that stretched from the foot of a cliff. To the east, beyond a stretch of coarsely grassed dunes, the sea glimmered, a band of grey steel. And to the north a great river decanted into the sea via a broad, sluggish delta system. The plain was wet and scrubby, littered by pools. At the base of the cliff itself, a broad lake was fed by springs that sprouted from the cliff’s rocks.

The coastal plain, with its caves and streams and pools and migrant herds, was the home of Joshua’s people. They called themselves the People of the Grey Earth. Others called them Hams. They had lived here for two thousand generations.

To Joshua, the landscape was a blur, marked out by the position of the other hunters, as if they glowed brightly — and by the horse, the centre of their attention.

A soft call came. Abel was waving his arm, indicating they should approach the horse a little closer. Abel was Joshua’s older brother.

Joshua crouched lower and moved through the grass, towards the incurious horse.

But now his questing fingers found something new, lying hidden in the grass. It was a stick, long and straight. No, it was a spear, with a stone tip fixed to the wood by some black, hard substance; he could see where twigs had been sheared away from it by a stone knife. He picked up the spear and hefted it, testing its weight. It was light and flimsy; it would surely break easily on a single thrust. Its shaft was oddly carved, into fine, baffling shapes.

A bear.

He dropped the spear, crying out, and stumbled back. Suddenly a bear had been looking at him, from out of the shaped wood in his hands.

A massive hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed to the ground.

Abel loomed over him. His skins, of horse and antelope, were tightly bound about his body by lengths of rawhide thread. His eyes were dark pools under his bony brow. “Th” horse,” he hissed.

“Bear,” Joshua said, panting. “Saw bear.”

Abel frowned and cast around, seeking the bear. Then he saw the broken spear. He picked it up, briefly fingering its dense carving, then hurled it from him with loathing. “Zealots,” he said. “Or En’lish. Skinny-folk.”

Yes, Joshua thought uneasily. Skinnies must have made the little spear. But nevertheless there had been, briefly, a bear glaring at him from out of the carved wood.

“Ho!” It was Saul, another of the Ham hunters. “Horse breakin’!”

Abel and Joshua struggled to their feet. The horse, startled, was coming straight towards the brothers, a mountain of meat and muscle, a giant as large as a carthorse.

Joshua grabbed a cobble, and Abel raised his thrusting spear. They grinned at each other in anticipation.

Joshua ran straight into the animal’s mighty chest.

He was knocked flying, and he landed in the dirt in a tangle of loosened furs. Winded, he got straight up, and ran back towards the fray.

He saw that his brother had grabbed the horse around its neck. The horse was bucking, still running, and it carried Abel with it; but Abel was stabbing at the horse’s throat with his spear. The spear was a short solid pillar of wood, stained deep with the blood of many kills. It was a weapon of strength and utility, without carving or decoration of any kind.

The slender spear of the Skinny-folk was meant to be thrown, so that an animal could be brought down from a distance, sparing such hard labour; the Hams had no such technology, and never would.

In a moment Abel’s thrusts had reached some essential organ, and the animal crashed to the dust. The other men closed, yelling, hurling themselves on the animal to subdue it before it died. With a gleeful howl, ignoring the pain of his bruised chest and back, Joshua joined in. Before the animal was overpowered they all suffered bruises and cuts; one man broke a finger.

When the horse was dead, the butchery began.

Joshua found a flat cobble. He sat on the ground with one leg folded under him, tucked a flap of antelope skin over each hand, and began to work the cobble with fast, precise motions.

With fast blows of a pebble, he knocked away bits of stone, working around the cobble until he had left a series of thin ridges on a domed surface. After twenty or thirty strokes, with bits of stone littering the ground around him, he pulled a bone hammer from the cord around his waist. The hammer was a bit of antelope thigh bone, broken, discoloured, heavily worn with use. With care, he struck one of the ridges. A thin, teardrop-shaped flake fell away. He picked it up and inspected it; it was fine and sharp, good enough for use without further work. He returned to his cobble and knocked out a series of flakes, with one confident blow after another, until the core had been returned to convexity. Then he began to prepare the core to make further flakes.

Joshua was good at working stone. It was a high art because each nodule of stone had its own unique properties; the toolmaker had to find a path through the stone to the tools he or she wanted. It was a question of seeing the tools in the raw stone. Men and women alike would watch his fast, precise movements, seeking to copy him. The women pushed their children towards him, making them watch. Nobody asked him about it, of course; people didn’t talk about tool making.

Making such tools was the thing Joshua did best, the thing for which he was most valued, the thing for which he valued himself. And yet it set him aside from the others.

He tucked his bone hammer back in his rawhide belt and took his flakes to the horse. He began work on a leg. With a series of swipes he cut down the skin on the inside of the limb, pulling it away from the muscle. Some of the horse’s thick brown hair stuck to the edge of the tool. Then he moved to the belly, opening up the hide. He grasped the open skin and pulled it sideways. Where membranes clung to the skin, he swiped at them gently with his flake, holding the stone at its centre between his fingers. The membranes parted easily. There was no blood, no mess.

When the horse was skinned, it was easily dismembered. Joshua cut away the meat of the neck. It fell open and was pulled away. He turned his axe over and over, seeking to use all its edge. When he was done he moved to the rib cage, and sliced down it with a crunch.

The people talked softly, steadily. They talked boastfully about their own and each other’s prowess in the hunt of the horse, the people waiting for them at the hut — especially young Mary, whose breasts and hips were beginning to fill out, making her a centre of intense interest among the men, and amusement for the women. Their attention was filled with each other; the horse, now it had turned to a mere mine of meat, had receded.

But even here, as the people worked together on the fallen horse, they sat a little away from Joshua. They were reluctant to look at him directly, and did not respond to what he said, as they responded to others.

Joshua was short, robust, heavily built. He was barrel-chested, and his arms and short, massive-boned legs were slightly bowed. His feet were broad, his toes fat and bony. His massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, were scarred from stone chips. His skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, was long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. His face was pulled forward into a great prow fronted by his massive, fleshy nose; his cheeks swept back as if streamlined, but his jaw, though chinless, was massive and thrust forward. Over each of his eyes a great ridge of bone thrust forward, masking his eyes. There was a pronounced dip above the brow ridges, before his shallow forehead led back into a tangle of hair.

He looked powerful, ferocious. But in his pale brown eyes there was uncertainty and confusion.

Joshua was twenty-five years old. Already he was one of the senior members of the group; only a handful of men and women were older than he was. And yet he still felt something of an outsider, as he had all his life.

The problem was his tool-making. He would always be valued for it. But others were suspicious of what lay at the centre of that profound skill: his ability to see the tools in the stone.

It was uncomfortably like what the Zealots did, and the English. Skinny-folk spoke to the sky and the ground as if they were people. Their tools were carved and painted in ways that, sometimes, made even Joshua see people or animals that weren’t really there.

Just as the knives and burins and scrapers he saw in the cobbles weren’t really there either, not until he dug them out. The others sensed that his head was full of strangeness, and that was why there was a barrier around him, a barrier that never broke down.

Now the hunters had completed their butchery, and the meat lay scattered around them in neat crimson piles. Joshua dropped his stone flakes, and soon forgot them. The hunters picked up cobbles and smashed open the bones. They would bring the meat back to their hut at the base of the cliffs. But first they would enjoy the warm, greasy, delicious marrow, the privilege of successful hunters. There was a mood of contentment. They knew that they need not hunt again for several days, that the women and children would welcome their return with joy, and that the evening would be filled with good food, companionship, and sex.

And, while the men lolled contentedly, Abel began to talk of the Grey Earth.

The Grey Earth was the home of the people.

The Hams had fallen, baffled, to this strange place of red dirt and grass. They lived here, but it was not as the Grey Earth had been. On the Grey Earth, the animals ran past the people’s caves like great rivers of meat. On the Grey Earth, there were no skinny Zealots or English or troublesome Elf-folk; on the Grey Earth there were only Hams, the people of the Grey Earth.

The men listened. The Grey Earth lay two thousand generations in the past, and now it made the people’s only legend, relayed from one generation to the next, utterly unchanging and unembroidered; they were a people conservative even in their story-telling.

But Joshua looked up into the sky. The sun was fading now, and the earth shone brightly. This earth was not the Grey Earth, for it was not grey, but a bright, watery blue.

The Hams lived in an unchanging present. Joshua’s sense of his life was of a series of days more or less-like today, stretching ahead of and behind him like images in a hall of mirrors, reaching from his dimly recalled days as a toddler begging scraps from his mother, all the way to no-longer-remote times when he would become as toothless and broken-down as old Jacob, back in the hut, again helpless and dependent on the kindness of others. The Hams knew of life and death and the cycle of their lives. But of the world beyond themselves they knew of no change.

…No change but one, Joshua reflected: in the past, they had lived on the Grey Earth, and now they did not.

Joshua looked at his companions as they rested, lolling against the ground, licking marrow from their fingertips, listening amiably to Abel’s loose legends. He knew that not one of them would share his thoughts, of past and future and change, of knives buried in rocks. Joshua kept silent, and peered up at the earth’s cool loveliness.

The hut was in the overhang of the cliff, close to the lake. It was built of beech saplings stuck in the ground, bent over and tied at the top. Skins of horses and antelopes had been laid loosely over the frame, weighted down with rocks. More massive rocks had been dragged to the rim of the hut. The area around was scattered with debris, animal bones, abandoned tools, cobbles scooped from the hut floor, and handfuls of ashes.

As the hunters returned with their haul of meat, Joshua saw that smoke was already rising from rents in the roof. Only a few children were outside, playing with the scattered cobbles and bits of skin. Joshua saw bats pecking hopefully at the abandoned bones.

The children ran to the hunters, and playfully grabbed at their meat.

Inside the hut the air was smoky, but the fires in their shallow hearths gave off a yellow-red glow that sent long flickering shadows over the dome of skin above. Beside the hearths, many of the women and children were already eating. The women had been hunting too. Impeded by their children and infants, women mostly did not tackle the huge game taken on by the men, but the steady flow of smaller game they returned, like beavers and rabbits and bats, provided more than half the group’s provisions.

Joshua began to shuck off his skins, loosening or cutting rawhide ropes and letting the skins fall where they might. In the hot, stuffy air of the hut he began to scrape dirt and sweat from his skin with a bit of antelope jaw bone.

Soon everybody was naked. Men and women alike were muscular and stocky, as were all but the very youngest children, so that the hut was filled with brawny, glistening bodies, moving to and fro with slabs of meat and bits of stone and bone and skin, comparing fresh injuries and wounds. The Hams lived lives of constant exertion and physical stress, and injuries were common.

Nobody knew their fathers here. But people were tied by loyalty to their mothers and siblings, and couples were more or less monogamous while they stayed together. So the horse meat was distributed through the group, fairly evenly.

Joshua, with his own slab of meat, found a place on the fringe of the hearth built by Ruth, who coupled with Abel. The low fire was surrounded by heaps of dried seaweed, to be used as bedding. Abel sat with Ruth, and two small children settled down before them, noisily tearing at rabbit legs, blood running down their chins.

One of the younger men approached the pubescent girl Mary, but she huddled close to her mother.

Joshua ate his meat raw, tearing at it with his shovel-shaped teeth and cutting it with a flake knife; every so often he scraped his teeth with the knife. And as his powerful jaw ground at the meat, great muscles worked in his cheeks.

On the fringe of the firelight he sat alone, speaking to nobody.

He had had only brief relationships with some of the women. Abel, by comparison, had shared a hearth with this one woman, Ruth, for many seasons. Like the men and even some of the children, the women saw too much strangeness in Joshua.

In one corner of the hut sat old Jacob. He was sitting on a patch of cobbles, flat sides up, laid over a damp place on the floor. He watched the others, waiting without complaint.

Now Abel, his own hunger sated, sat beside the older man. He gossiped to him gently of the day, of who had said and done what to whom, and he tore at meat, cutting off strips with a small knife. But the old man had trouble chewing; he complained loudly about the pain of the pulpy stumps of his smashed teeth. So Abel chewed the meat himself, pulling at it until it was soft, and pushed it into Jacob’s mouth as if feeding an infant. Jacob accepted it without comment or shame.

Jacob’s body showed the traces of a long life’s relentless work. A charge by an enraged horse had left him with smashed teeth, a shattered arm, a crushed left side and a sprained leg that stubbornly refused to heal. The suite of injuries had left him incapable of participating in the hunt, or even joining in the easier tasks of the hut, like building the fires or making tools.

Joshua recalled how a healthier Jacob had once helped Joshua tend Miriam, Joshua’s mother, when she lay dying of an illness that had made her belly swell and caused her to cough blood. And now Abel tended Jacob. It was the way of things, accepted without question.

Jacob was the oldest individual in the group, at thirty-nine years old.

As the evening drew in the adults gathered in loose knots. Joshua joined a loose circle, saying little, cutting at a stick of fire-hardened wood to make a new thrusting spear. Ruth scraped at the skin of the horse to remove its fur, and dragged it through her teeth. Others settled into similar quiet chores.

Like the others Joshua listened intently to the talk, absorbing every detail of rumours, of promises made, romances broken, children praised or disciplined, injuries healed or acquired. His hands worked at the stick, but it was a simple, ancient task, so deeply ingrained by generations of practice that it was almost as unconscious as breathing. It was as if all that existed in the world was the circle of faces, orbiting the light of the fires. All they talked of was each other, never of the tools they made; those were things of doing, not talking.

As the last of the daylight seeped out of the bits of sky visible through the smoke vents, people drifted apart. Abel took Ruth’s hand and led her to a dark corner of the hut, close to where toothless Jacob snored noisily.

Joshua lay down alone, close to the fire Ruth had built, on a rough pallet of seaweed. He stared into the fire, and he thought he saw creatures capering in the flames. Skinny-people like the Zealots or the English. But though the dancing creatures amused him, they disturbed him too, for there were only flames, no people or animals here.

It seemed to Joshua that he woke to hear a soft gasp, like surprise, from Jacob, and then silence. But Joshua ignored this, and fell deeper into sleep.

In the morning they found Jacob lying dead, slumped over on his damaged arm.

They would bury Jacob just outside the hut’s main entrance.

Joshua swept away rubbish, picked-over animal bones and flakes of worked rock, and began to dig, using bare hands and stone scrapers, powerful muscles working.

When the grave was done it was about half Joshua’s height in length, and so shallow that when he stood in it, its lip barely came up to his knees. Even so the diggers had disturbed other bones, yellow and brown from their immersion in the ground, the bones of people long forgotten.

Abel carried Jacob’s corpse in his arms. The ruined body, toothless mouth gaping, was light, for it had been some time since Jacob could eat properly. Abel was weeping, for he had been fond of Jacob, who was now gone. Abel put the body on the ground. He tried to fold it up into a foetal position, knees tucked against the chest, head resting on a forearm. But the body was already too stiff. So Abel and others were forced to haul at the body until its joints cracked, and it folded as required. Then Abel bound up the wrists and ankles with rawhide thong.

Children watched wide-eyed.

Abel set the body into the grave among the yellowed bones of deeper, nameless ancestors. Then he used his broad feet to scuff dirt back into the hole.

Others joined in, with hands and feet, kicking at the piles of dirt around the grave. When the grave was roughly filled, Abel stamped on it to level it, and allowed the children to run over it.

People wept openly. Many of them had loved Jacob. But now Jacob was gone.

If the world of the Hams was unchanging, it was also a world of limits. If too many children were born, then they would starve, for the land afforded only so much food. No animal could be hunted save those small or old or weak enough to be brought down by the strength of a combination of hunters at close quarters. Every person went through life limited by their strength and their health and the richness of the land and the vagaries of the weather. Nobody, not even Joshua, could make a new tool, of a type that had not been made before.

And here was the ultimate limit, the limit of death. Jacob was gone, no more existent than in the days before he was born, beyond hope and pain and love. For now the people grieved, and they would speak of him as if he were alive. But soon those who remembered him would die in their turn, and even his name would fade from the world.

Absently Joshua looked up to the sky, his thick neck stiff, seeking the Blue Earth.

And that was when he saw it: a thing like a bat that sailed across the sky, black and white like a gull — and yet it was not a bat. Its wings were stiff, and it was huge and fat, and it drifted beneath a huge blue and white skin, suspended there by threads.

It sailed out of Joshua’s sight, beyond the line of the cliffs. He watched, open-mouthed, noting where the extraordinary bat-creature fell.

Shadow:

Shadow didn’t want to wake up. In her sleep she was warm and cushioned by the woven branches, dreaming arboreal dreams five million years old.

It was the baby that dispelled her dreams, with a bout of savage kicking that led to a stabbing stomach cramp.

Her green mood shattered in a hail of red. She rolled over, groaning, and her gullet flexed, as if she were about to vomit. But it was a dry retch; her stomach was empty.

She sat up, rubbing the base of her belly. Slowly the cramps eased. The sun was already above the horizon, the sky tinged subtly pink by the air’s dust.

She inspected this tree to which she had fled in the dark. Elf-folk had been here. The branches were twisted and torn where they had been pulled together for nests, and much of the green fruit of the tree was missing.

She had not come far. She was still within the range of the people. The sun was already high, glimmering down through the canopy. The people woke with the dawn. They might be close already.

She grabbed a handful of fruit and pushed it into her mouth.

The people. As she did every time she woke, she remembered in grim red shards what had happened to her. Claw and Big Boss and Little Boss and the rejection by her mother. The fragmentary, terrified images broke up into a wash of green and red and blue. She hooted in alarm, as if some predator had come wheeling out of her own head to threaten her.

She abandoned her nest and scurried down the tree to the ground. She crashed through the undergrowth, twisting aside small branches and shrubs without a thought for the noise she was making. She saw no people, and did not hear them.

And she did not stop until she was in a place she did not know.

For the first time in her life, she was in a place without the guidance of her elders, who had known the position of every fruiting tree, every bubbling stream. Everything was new. the trees, the rocks, the subtle crimson shades of the dust, even the way the sun lanced down through the canopy. She had no way to figure out a path through this new landscape, a way to survive. Her kind did not see patterns in the natural world; they learned the features of the environment around them — the dangers, the sources of food and water — by rote.

Panic struck her. She longed to run back the way she had come.

She thought of Claw.

One of the trees had a hole in its trunk, a little above her eye level. Suddenly she was thirsty. She probed at the hole with one finger. She was rewarded with cool dampness. She pulled out her finger and licked it. Hastily she gathered leaves, chewed them to a spongy mass, and stuck them in the hole. When she pulled out the leaf mass it was dripping wet, and she sucked the water gratefully.

Her stomach clenched abruptly. She squatted on her haunches and briskly, painfully, passed watery shit. She took some soft, crumbling wood from a rotting tree trunk, mashed it up to a wool, and used it to wipe her backside clean of the sour-smelling stuff.

She heard a distant hooting, an answering scream. It was the Elf-folk.

As soon as she was able, she got to her feet and walked on, feeding on whatever fruit and shoots she found, heading resolutely away from the noises of her people.

But soon, very soon, she ran out of forest. She stood on the fringe of the open savannah, clinging to the forest’s green shade.

And a bat came drifting across the sky, a great black and white bat with blue wings.

She howled and lunged back into the green mouth of the forest.

Emma Stoney:

After getting away from Fire’s Runner group, Emma had followed the beckoning Ham woman into the forest. It was an arduous trek, through increasingly dense foliage. But after perhaps a mile they came to a small clearing.

There were shelters here, made of skins stretched out over saplings driven into the ground. There was an overpowering stench, of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur. Even the walls of the huts stank, she found, a musty, disagreeable odour of a kind she associated with the clothing of old people who didn’t wash or change enough.

But, stench or not, it was a kind of village.

A Ham village.

A village of Neandertals. She approached cautiously, following the Ham who had found her.

The Hams barely seemed to notice her. They were utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children plucked at her clothing with their intimidating, strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams stepped around her, their eyes sliding away.

But however coolly the Hams greeted Emma, they did not expel her.

She dug out her own hearth and built a fire.

Nobody shared food with her that first night. But the next day she managed to catch a rabbit with a home-made snare, and she brought the meat back to the camp and cooked it, even sharing a little with the adults. They took the meat, sniffing the burned stuff gingerly, but ignored her.

So it went on.

There were many of them, she soon learned, perhaps eighty or ninety, in shelters that faded into the dense green forest background.

With their hulking bodies and broad bony faces the Hams seemed like extras in some dreadful old movie to Emma, wrapped up in their animal skins, knocking their crude tools out of the rock. Everything they did, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air — was suffused with strength — they seemed much more powerful even than the Runners — and Emma quailed before their brute power. But it was apparent that such strength was not always wisely applied, for she saw evidence of a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and scarred skin.

They were humans, of a sort, but humans who made a living about the hardest way she could imagine. Their favoured hunting technique, for example, even for the largest prey, was to wrestle it to the ground. It was like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.

But they cared for their children, and for their ill and elderly.

And they spoke English, just like Fire’s people, the Runners. Who could have taught them? That central mystery nagged at her — and she sensed her own destiny lay in unravelling it.

The forest, like the savannah, was full of predators: cats and bears and dogs, not to mention snakes and insects, some of them giant-sized, that she didn’t trust at all.

But the most dangerous creatures of all were the people.

There seemed to be many types of homimds wandering around this globe. She knew there were Hams and Runners and Elf-folk and Nutcracker-folk, and presumably others. The vegetarian Nutcrackers seemed content to chew on bamboo and nuts in the depths of the forest, following a sleepy, untroubled, almost mindless lifestyle that Emma sometimes envied. The Runners conversely generally stuck to the plains.

The forest-dwelling Elf-folk — three or four feet high, like upright, savage chimps — were, for Emma, the most dangerous factor in the landscape. Having glimpsed what that troupe of Elf-folk had done to the Runner child, to finish her life as a living food source in the hands of Elf-men remained her abiding nightmare.

But everybody pretty much left the Hams alone.

For one thing, with their clothing and comparatively elaborate tool kit and distorted English they were a lot smarter than the rest. And they were beefy besides, even the women and children, more than a match for any Elf.

For all the Hams jabbered their broken English, Emma knew she could never become part of this inward-looking, deeply conservative community. But she also knew she was a lot safer here than wandering around, alone in the forest.

And so she stayed, inhabiting a rough lean-to on the edge of the community, bit by bit building up her own survival skills and recovering her strength, and waiting for something to turn up.

The Hams” technology was more advanced than the Runners’, but still, considering those big brain pans, remarkably limited. They had more advanced knapping techniques, manufacturing a range of flakes and points and burins in addition to the ubiquitous hand-axes. They fitted stone tips to their thick thrusting spears.

But that was about it. They had no piece of technology with more than two or three components. They didn’t have innovations even Emma could think of, such as spear-throwers and bows.

Other gaps. If they weren’t interested in something — a type of plant, for instance, which had no use for food or medicine or tools, nor carried any threat as a poison — they simply ignored it. If it didn’t matter, it was as if it didn’t even exist; as far as she could tell there were whole categories of such “useless” objects and phenomena which had no names.

There were no books here, of course — there was nothing like writing of any kind. And no art: no paintings on animal skins, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child’s face.

Indeed, the Hams seemed to loathe symbology of any kind. The Hams tolerated the odd colours of Emma’s skin and hair, her slimness of build, the way she spoke, even the garish blue of her clothes — but they could not bear the South African air force logo that adorned the breast of her flight suit, and she had to cut it out with a stone knife. (Loath to throw away anything that had come from home, she had tucked the patch into a pocket on her sleeve.)

She came to suspect that what disturbed them wasn’t the symbols themselves as much as the response of herself to them — and other Skinny-folk, a class which seemed to include herself and the mysterious “Zealots” and “En’lish’. The Hams would jabber about how Skinnies saw people in the rock, as if the symbols themselves were somehow sentient.

As a result, the Hams” world was a starthngly drab place, lacking art and religion and story — save, of course, for their one great central myth of the Grey Earth, where they had come from. They didn’t tell jokes. The children played only as baby chimps might, exercising their muscles and testing their animal reactions against each other.

And to them, death appeared to be a genuine termination, a singularity beyond which an individual, leaving no trace, had no meaning. To the Hams, today was everything, yesterday a minor issue — and if you weren’t here tomorrow, you wouldn’t matter.

In many ways, they were like the Runners, then. But, unlike the Runners, they talked and talked and talked. They seemed to have a wide vocabulary, much of it English, and they would hold long, complex conversations around their fires.

But it was only gossip. They never talked about how to make a better tool. Just about each other.

Emma thought she had gotten used to the Runners, who were a strange mixture of human and animal. If these Hams were still not quite human as she was, nevertheless they had their own gaps in their heads, barriers between the rooms. As she watched them jabbering of who was screwing whom while their hands worked at one tool or another, apparently independently, she found it hard to imagine how it must be to be a Ham.

Sometimes she envied them, however.

To her, a beautiful sunset was a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, of hope for a better day tomorrow. The Hams would watch such displays as intently as she did. But to them, she believed, a sunset was just a sunset, like the sound of some instrument lacking any overtones, a simple pure tone but a tone with a beauty and purity which they experienced directly and without complication, as if it was the first sunset they had ever seen.

Day succeeded empty day.

At first, on arriving here, she dreamed of physical luxuries: running hot water, clean, well-prepared food, a soft bed. But as time wore on, it was as if her soul had been eroded down. She had simpler needs now: to sleep in the open on a bower of leaves no longer troubled her; to have her skin coated in slippery grime was barely noticeable.

But she longed for security, to be able to settle down to sleep without wondering if she would be alive to see the morning, to live without the brutality and death that permeated the forest.

And she longed for the sight of another human face. It didn’t have to be Malenfant. Anybody.

One day her wish was granted.

They had been men, pushing their way through the forest, pursuing some project of their own. They wore clothing of animal skin, but it was carefully stitched a long way beyond the crude wraps the Hams tied around their bodies — and they spoke English, with a strong, twisted accent.

Emma was electrified. She gazed on their thin, somewhat pinched faces with longing, as intently as one Ham might gaze at another. Were they the source of the Hams” and Runners” language? Her impulse was to call out to them, approach them.

But she saw that the Hams cowered from these Zealots, as they called them, a label Emma found less than encouraging. So she, too, slipped back into the forest with her Hams.

Sometimes she raged inwardly. Or she worked through imaginary conversations with Malenfant — who had, after all, been flying the plane when she got stuck here, and so was the only person she could think of to blame.

But when the Hams saw her stalking around the forest lashing at branches and lianas, or, worse, muttering to herself, they became disturbed.

So she learned not to look inwards.

She watched the Hams as they shambled about their various tasks, their brute bodies wrapped up in tied-on animal skins like Christmas parcels. One day at a time: that was how the Hams lived, with no significant thought for tomorrow for they appeared simply to assume that tomorrow would be much like today, and like yesterday, and the day before that.

She did not abandon her shining thread of hope that someday she would get out of here — without that she would have feared for her sanity — but she tried to emulate the Hams in their focus on the now. One day at a time. It was almost comforting. She tried to accept the notion that the best prospect for the rest of her life might be to dwell on the fringes of a group like this: physically safe, but excluded, utterly ignored, the only representative of a different, and uninteresting species.

The future stretched out in front of her, a long dark hall empty of hope.

Until she sighted the lander.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant took a tentative step away from the lander. Encumbered by his escape suit, breathing canned air, he peered out of a sealed-up helmet. His heavy black boots crunched on dead leaves and sparse grass, all of it overlaid on a ruddy, dusty soil. But he could barely hear the noise of his footsteps, and could not smell the grass or the leaves.

All around this little clearing, dense forest sprouted: a darkness through which green shadows flitted. He tipped back on his heels and peered up into a tall, washed-out sky. The Earth sailed there, fat and blue, the outline of a continent dimly visible.

So here was Reid Malenfant walking on the surface of a new world: a boyhood dream, realized at last. But he sure hadn’t expected it to be like this.

Maybe he was unimaginative — it was something Emma had accused him of many times — maybe he had focused too much on the battle to assemble the mission in the first place, and the thrilling details of the three-day flight across space to get here. Maybe, somehow, he had been expecting this wandering Red Moon would be content to serve as no more than a passive stage for his designs. Now, for the first time, on some deep, gut level, he realized that this was a whole world he was dealing with here — complex in its own right, with its own character and issues and dangers.

And his scheme to rescue Emma seemed as absurd and quixotic as many of his opponents at home had argued.

But what else could he have done but come here and try?

Nemoto was walking around the clearing experimentally, slim despite the bulky orange escape suit and the parachute pack still strapped to her back. Her gait was something like a Moonwalk, halfway between a walk and a run “Fascinating,” she said “Walking is a pendulum-like motion, an interchange between the body’s gravitational potential energy and the forward kinetic energy. The body, seeking to minimize mechanical energy spent, aims for an optimal form of gait — walking or running — at any given speed. But the lower the gravity, the lower the speed at which walking breaks into running. It’s all a question of scaling laws. The Froude number—”

“Give me a break, Nemoto.”

She stopped, coming to stand beside him. And, before he could stop her, she unlocked her helmet and removed it.

She grinned at him. She looked green about the gills, but then she always did. And she hadn’t dropped dead yet.

Malenfant lifted his own helmet over his head. He kept his hand on the green apple pull that would activate his suit’s emergency oxygen supply. His Snoopy hat comms unit felt heavy, incongruous in this back-to-nature environment.

He took a deep breath.

The air was thin. But he’d anticipated as much, and the altitude training he’d gone through reduced the ache in his chest to a distant nuisance. (But Emma, he remembered, had had no altitude training; this thin air must have hurt her.) The air was moist, faintly cold, what he would describe as bracing. He could smell green, growing things — the autumn smell of dead leaves, a denser green scent that came from the forest.

And he could smell ash.

Nemoto was inspecting a small portable analyser. “No unanticipated toxins,” she said. “Thin but breathable.” She stripped off her Snoopy hat, and started to shuck off her orange pressure suit. “In fact,” she said, “the air here is healthier than in most locations on Earth.”

After their three days in space cooped up in a volume no larger than the interior of a family car, Malenfant was no longer shy of Nemoto. But he felt oddly self-conscious getting naked, out here in the open, where who-knew-what eyes might be watching. But he began to unzip his suit anyhow. “I can smell ash.”

“That is probably the Bullseye,” Nemoto said. The big volcano had been observed to erupt more or less continuously since the Red Moon’s arrival in Earth orbit, perhaps induced by the tides exerted by the Earth on its new Moon. “You should welcome the ash, Malenfant. This is a small world, with no tectonic activity, Weathering here is a one-way process, and without a restorative mechanism all the air would eventually get locked up in the rocks, with no way to recycle it.”

“Like Mars.”

“And yet not like Mars. We don’t yet understand the geological and biological cycles on the Red Moon. Perhaps we never will. But the injection of gases into the air by the Bullseye surely serves to keep the atmosphere replenished. What else do you notice?”

He raised his head, sniffed, listened.

“Birdsong,” Nemoto said. “An absence rather than a presence.”

“No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity.”

“But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration… We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth.”

A pity, Malenfant thought.

Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun’s heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth — an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.

Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extra-vehicular activity, with, to Malenfant’s mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.

Soon the little camera on Malenfant’s shoulder was swivelling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. “Good grief,” he said. “I feel like Long John Silver.”

Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn’t sure whether she understood the reference or not.

With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. “Water,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.”

Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander’s incongruous black and white carcass.

Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.

The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn’t his fault.

After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement…) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent’s eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.

That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn’t proven quite so cooperative.

As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world’s surprising deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon’s meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant’s mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander’s prow.

The lander’s autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean — the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.

“The trees appear to be predominantly spruce,” Nemoto said. “The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth—”

“I know,” Malenfant growled. “We’d have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin’s jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin’s last walk from the sky.”

“But our landing was not so terminal,” Nemoto said dryly. “Not yet anyhow.”

The sturdy little craft could never make another descent — but that didn’t matter, for it didn’t need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander’s rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander’s shell, sheltering its crew, hadn’t crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth — completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it — fit it and launch.

Oh, and find Emma.

Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not to break into a run.

The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a not of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl’s. He backed away, cautiously.

He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.

He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, “Here’s some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch—”

A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.

Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.

“The double-domes said there would be no small animals here,” he grumbled. “Thin air, fast metabolism—”

“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all.” She grabbed the fruit. “Your description of this banana was acute.” She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. “But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artefact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight.”

Malenfant took another banana, peeled it and bit into it savagely. “You’re a real smart ass, Nemoto, you know that?”

“Malenfant, all the species here should be familiar, more or less. We have the hommid samples who fell through the portals to the Earth. Although their species is uncertain, their DNA sequencing was close to yours and mine…”

A shadow moved through the forest behind Nemoto: black on green, utterly silent, fluid.

“Holy shit,” Malenfant said.

The shadow moved forward, resolved, stepped into the light.

It was a woman. And yet it was not.

She must have been six feet tall, as tall as Malenfant. Her eyes locked on Malenfant’s, she bent, picked up the banana Nemoto had dropped, and popped it into her mouth, skin and all.

She was naked, hairless save for a dark triangle at her crotch and a tangle of tight curls on her head. She held nothing in her hands, wore no belt, carried no bag. She had the body of a nineteen-year-old tennis player, Malenfant thought, or a heptathlete: good muscles, high breasts. Perhaps her chest was a little enlarged, the ribs prominent, affording room for the larger lungs the theorists had anticipated, like an inhabitant of a 1950s dream of Mars. There was a liquid grace in her movements, a profound thoughtfulness in her stillness.

But over this wonderful body, and a small, child-like face, was the skull of a chimp. That was Malenfant’s first impression anyhow: there were ridges of bone over the eyes, a forehead that sloped sharply back. Not a chimp, no, but not human either.

Her eyes were blue and human.

“Homo erectus,” Nemoto was muttering nervously. “Or H. ergaster. Or some other species we never discovered. Or something unrelated to any hominid that ever evolved on Earth… And even if descended from some archaic stock, this is not a true Erectus, of course, but a descendant of that lineage shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — just as a chimp is not like our common ancestor, but a fully evolved species in its own right.”

“You talk too much, Nemoto.”

“Yes… We have seen the reconstructions, inspected the bodies ejected from the Wheel. But to confront her alive, moving, is eerie.”

The hominid girl studied Malenfant with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of a child, without calculation or fear.

He stepped forward. He could smell the girl: unwashed, not like an animal, an intense locker-room smell. He felt a deep charge, pulling him to her. At first he thought it was an erotic attraction — and that was present too; the combination of that clear animal gaze and the beautiful, fully human body was undeniably compelling, even if he sensed those stringy arms could break his back if she chose. But what he felt was deeper than that. It was a kind of recognition, he thought.

“I know you,” he said.

The girl stared back at him.

Nemoto fidgeted behind him. “Malenfant, we were given protocols for encounters like this.”

He murmured, “I should offer her a candy and show her a picture card?” He returned his attention to the girl. “I know you,” he repeated.

I know who you are. We evolved together. Once my grandmother and yours ran around the echoing plains of Africa, side by side.

This is a first contact, it struck him suddenly: a first contact between humanity and an alien intelligent species — for the intelligence in those eyes could not be denied, despite the absence of tools and clothing.

…Or rather, this is a contact renewed. How strange to think that buried deep in man’s past was a last contact, a last time we met one of these cousins of ours: perhaps a final encounter between one of my own ancestors and a girl like this in the plains of Asia, or a dying Neandertal on the fringe of the Atlantic, when we left them no place else to go.

The girl held her hands out, palms up. “Banana,” she said, thickly, clearly.

Malenfant’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”

“English,” Nemoto breathed. “She speaks English.”

“En’lish,” the girl said.

Now Malenfant’s heart hammered. “That must mean Emma is here. She is near, and she survived.”

Nemoto said cautiously, “We know very little, Malenfant; there is a whole world around us, a world of secrets.”

There was a crackle behind Malenfant: a twig breaking, a footfall. He whirled.

There were more of the ape-people, eight or ten of them, male and female, all adults. They were as naked as the girl, though not all as handsome; some of them sported scars, gashes and even burns, and some had hair streaked with grey. They were standing in a line, neatly fencing off Malenfant and Nemoto from the lander, and they were all gazing hard at the two of them.

“These do not seem quite so friendly,” Nemoto murmured.

“Oh, really? You think now’s a good time to start the sign-language classes?”

“Malenfant, where are the guns?”

“…In the lander.” Shit.

The silence stretched. The ape-people stood like statues.

“I am loath to abandon the lander,” Nemoto hissed. “We have not even packed the contingency samples.”

Malenfant suppressed a foolish laugh. “There go our science bonuses.”

One of the ape-people stepped forward. Straggles of beard clung to his chin, though the longer strands seemed to have been cut, crudely. He opened his mouth and hissed. Malenfant thought his teeth were stained red.

Nemoto said, “Malenfant, I think—”

“Yeah. I think he’s about to take a sample of us.”

The big man raised his arm. Too late, Malenfant saw he was holding a stone in his fist. Malenfant ducked sideways. The stone missed his head, but it sliced through the layers of cloth over his shoulder, and nicked the flesh.

“Plan B,” he gasped.

The two of them broke and ran for the forest. They pushed past the girl, who made a half-hearted effort to grab them. For a heartbeat Malenfant nursed a hope that he had made some connection, that she had on some level decided to let them go.

But then he was plunging into the green mouth of the forest after Nemoto, and there was no time for reflection.

The forest, away from the sunlight, was suffused by a clinging cloudy moistness that seemed to linger around every bush, and made every tree trunk slippery under Malenfant’s palms. Soon they were both shivering.

And it was almost impossible to walk. Malenfant had done a little jungle survival training during his induction into the Shuttle programme. But this forest was almost impassable, so deeply layered were the tangled roots, branches, leaves and moss over the uneven ground. Malenfant was acutely aware that this was not a place for humans.

Still they blundered on, slipping, crashing, blundering, falling, making a noise that must have echoed off the flanks of the Bullseye itself.

He imagined the frantic activity in the back rooms of Mission Control in Houston, the buzzing calls to palaeontologists and anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. For once in his life he would have been glad to hear the tinny voices from the ground. But, though there was a hiss of static from the tiny speaker built into his shoulder pack, he could make out no voices.

Once he thought he confronted one of the ape-people. He caught a glimpse of someone — some thing — in the dense green gloom ahead of him, upright like an ape-person, but smaller, chimp-sized, maybe hairy. It jabbered at him, reached up its long arms, and slipped out of sight into the forest canopy above.

After that, Malenfant found himself looking for possible threats upwards as well as side to side.

At length, breathing hard in the thin air, shivering, they came to a halt, crouching close to the ground by a fat, fungus-laden tree trunk. Malenfant’s face was slick with sweat and forest dew.

Nemoto’s eyes were wide in the gloom, glancing this way and that, like a cornered animal.

“We haven’t been too smart, have we?” he whispered.

“We were not expecting to come under immediate attack by a troupe of Homo erectus.”

“Yeah, but it’s taken us a bare half-hour after opening the hatch to lose the lander, our supplies, and our weapons. I’m not even sure which way we’re running.”

“We will recover the lander.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we must,” Nemoto said simply.

A shadow slid across his field of view. It was subtle, difficult to distinguish from the swaying motion of a branch, the shifting coins of dappled sunlight that lay over the forest floor.

The camera on his shoulder swivelled to look into his face, and he forced a grin “If you guys have any suggestions, now would be a good time… ”

Eight, nine, ten shadows moved, all around them, shadows that coalesced into ape-people.

“The Erectus. They have been hunting us,” Nemoto said. “Their intelligence is advanced enough for that, at least.” She seemed calm, beyond fear.

The ape-people advanced. Some of them were grinning, and one of the men, perhaps excited by the prospect of a kill, sported an impressive erection.

Malenfant stood up slowly. The camera on his shoulder swivelled back and forth, whirring, somehow the most distracting object in his universe. He said, “I think—”

A vast, heavy creature came running out of the depths of the wood. It hurled itself at the largest ape-man. They rolled on the floor, wrestling.

The ape-men gathered around the combatants, hooting and hollering, their teeth showing between drawn-back lips — perhaps a rictus of fear — and they slapped ineffectually at the rolling figures.

Nemoto clutched Malenfant’s arm, and they backed away.

Nemoto said, “I thought it was a bear.”

“No,” Malenfant said grimly.

No, not a bear: a man — yet another sort of man, shorter than his naked opponent, but much more heavily muscled, and dressed in animal skins that were tied to his body with bits of red-black rope. Though the ape-man on the ground was a formidable opponent — surely more than a match for any human in hand-to hand combat — the bear-man was stronger yet, and soon he had the ape-man pinned to the ground by sitting on his chest.

The bear-man snarled, “Enough?”

Once again the use of English, distorted but clear enough, startled Malenfant. Was it really credible that Emma could have taught the use of English to not one but two species of other-men? But if not, what was going on?

The man on the ground snapped at the hand that slapped him, but it was clear that the fight had gone out of him. The bear-man sat back and let him up.

The ape-man rejoined his companions and, his defiance momentarily sparking, he growled at the bear-man. “Ham! Eat Ham good eat!”

The bear-man — the “Ham” — opened his huge mouth wide, exposing a row of flat brown teeth. He ran at the ape-people, making them scatter, and with a broad, bare foot he aimed a heavy kick at the naked rump of the last man.

Then the bear-man walked up to Malenfant and Nemoto. He was a good head shorter than Malenfant — no more than five five, five six — but he was broad as a barn door. Under the skins which wrapped him loosely, Malenfant could see muscles moving. His walk was somewhat ungainly, as if his legs were bowed, or his balance not quite perfect. His skull was long and flat, with a bulge at the back that showed beneath a sprawl of thick black hair. He had a vast cavernous nose, and brown eyes glinted beneath bony brows like two caves. Sweat had pooled in a hollow between the brow ridges and his low forehead.

“Neandertal,” Nemoto muttered. “Or possibly Homo heidelbergensis. Most probably Neandertalensis, of the so-called classic variant. Or rather a lineage evolved from Neandertal stock, in this unique place.”

Malenfant could smell beer on the Neandertal’s breath. “Holy shit,” he said. Beer?

The Neandertal — or bear-man, or Ham — grinned at them. “Stupi” Runners,” he said. “Scare easy.” He stuck his tongue out and lunged forward. “Boo!”

Both Malenfant and Nemoto took a step back. The bear-man’s voice was gravelly and thick, and his vowel sounds slurred one into the other. “But,” Malenfant said, “he speaks better than I do after a couple of hours at the Outpost.”

Now there was a crashing from the forest that resolved itself into clumsy, unconcealed footsteps. A new voice called, “What the devil is going on, Thomas?”

Malenfant frowned, trying to place the accent. English, of course — a British accent, maybe — but twisted in a way he didn’t recognize.

The bear-man called, “Here, Baas. Runners. Chase off.”

A man walked out of the shadows towards them — a human this time, a stocky man, white, aged maybe fifty, with a grubby walrus moustache. He was dressed in a buckskin suit, and he had a kind of crossbow over his shoulder. What looked like a long-legged rabbit hung from his belt.

When he saw Malenfant and Nemoto, he stopped dead, mouth a perfect circle.

Malenfant spread his hands wide. “We’re from America. NASA.”

The man frowned. “From where?… Have you come to rescue us?” Malenfant saw hope spark in his eyes, sudden, intense. He walked towards Malenfant, hand extended. “McCann. Hugh McCann. Oh, it has been so long in this place! Are you here to take us home?”

Malenfant felt a light touch on his shoulder, a soft crunch. When he looked, the camera he had worn there had gone, disappeared into the paw of the Neandertal.

Emma Stoney:

The spaceship had been quite unmistakable as it drifted out of the sky, heading east, Shuttle-orbiter black and white under a glowing blue and white canopy. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be, but she’d swear she made out the round blue NASA meatball logo on its flank.

Malenfant. Who else?

She knew immediately she had to follow it. She couldn’t stay with the Ham troupe any more. She couldn’t rely on whoever had drifted down from the sky to come find her. Her destiny had been in her own hands since the moment she had fallen out of the sky of Earth into this strange place, and it was no different now. She had to get herself to that lander.

She gathered up her gear. She equipped herself with stone tools and spears from the Ham encampment — without guilt, for the Hams seemed to make most of their tools as they needed them and then abandoned them. With her hat of woven grasses and her poncho of animal skin, all draped over the remnants of her air force coverall, she must look like the wild woman of the woods, she thought.

She attempted to say goodbye to the Ham who had first found her, and to some of the others she had gotten to know. But she was met with only blankness or bafflement.

After all, since nobody ever went anywhere, nobody said goodbye in a Ham community — except maybe at death.

She slipped into the forest.

Shadow:

Thanks to extended pulses of volcanism, this small world was steadily warming, and temperate forests were shrinking back in favour of more open grasslands. The range of Shadow’s family group was only a little smaller than the remnant of forest to which they clung; with invisible, unconscious skill, Shadow’s elders had always guided her away from the exposed fringes of the forest.

But now her people had turned on Shadow. And to escape them she would have to leave her forest home.

Emerging from the trees, she found herself at the foot of a shallow forest covered slope, a foothill of taller mountains which reared up behind her. She faced a wide plain, a range of open, park-like savannah, grasslands punctuated by stands of trees. To the right of the plain a broad river ran, sluggish and brown. Away to the left a range of more rocky hills rose, their lower slopes coated with a thick carpet of forest. The hills marched away m a subtly curving ring; they were the rim mountains of a small crater.

She longed to slink back into the dark cool womb of the woods behind her.

She looked again at that smudge of green covering the crater wall. Forest: the only other patch of it in her vision. She thought of food and water, nests high in the trees.

She took a step out into the open.

The sun’s heat was like a warm hand on her scalp. She saw her shadow at her feet, shrunken by the height of the sun. The forest behind her tugged at her heart like the call of her mother. But she did not turn back.

She ran forward, alone, her footsteps singing in the grass.

She was soon hot, panting, dreadfully thirsty. Her thick fur trapped the heat of the sun. Her feet ached as they pounded the ground. Her arms dangled uselessly at her side; she longed to grasp, to climb. But there was nothing here to climb. She ran on, clumsy, determined, over ground that shone red through sparse yellow grass.

But as she ran she turned this way and that, fearing predators. A cat or a hyena would have little difficulty outrunning her, and still less in bringing her down. And she watched those remote woods. To her dismay they seemed to come no closer, no matter how hard she ran.

She came to a clear, shallow stream.

Unbearably thirsty, panting, she waded straight into the water. The stream was deliciously cool. The bed was of cobbles, laced with green growing things that streamed in the water. At its deepest the stream came up a little way beyond her knees.

She slid forward until she was on all fours. She rolled on her back, letting the water soak into her fur. She raised handfuls of water to her mouth. The water, leaking from her fingers, had a greenish tinge, and it was a little sour, but it was cold. She drank deeply, letting the water wash away the dust in her mouth and nose. She saw a thin trail of dust and blood seeping away from her.

A thin mucus clung to her wet hand. She saw that it contained tiny, almost transparent shrimps. She scraped the shrimps off her palm and popped them in her mouth. Their taste was sharp and creamy and delicious.

She stood up. With her gravid belly stroking the surface of the stream, she put her hands in the water, open like a scoop. She watched carefully as the water trickled through her fingers, and when the little crustaceans struck her palm she closed her hands around them.

Her thoughts dissolved, becoming pink and blue, like the sky, like the shrimp.

When she had had her fill of shrimp she clambered out of the stream, her fur dripping. She reclined on the bank. She folded her legs and inspected her feet. They were bruised and cut, and a big blister had swollen up on one toe. She washed her feet clean of the last of the grit between her toes, and then inspected the blister curiously; when she poked it with a fingernail the clear liquid in it moved around, accompanied by a sharp pain.

She heard a distant growl.

Startled, she tucked her feet underneath her, resting her knuckles on the ground. She peered around at the open plain.

The shadows, of rocks and isolated trees, had grown long. She had forgotten where she was: while she had played in the water, the day had worn away. She mewled and wrapped her long arms around her torso. She did not want to return to the running. But every instinct in her screamed that she must get off the ground before night fell.

She climbed out of the stream and began running towards the crater rim hills.

The light faded, terribly rapidly. Her shadow stretched out before her, and then dissolved into greyness.

Her face began to itch, as if some insect was working its way into her skin. She scratched her cheeks and brow. She looked for someone to groom her. But there was nobody here, and the itch wouldn’t go away.

Still she ran, thirsty, dusty, exhausted.

And still those growls came, echoing across the savannah: the voices of predators calling to each other, marking out the territory they claimed.

It grew darker. The earth climbed in the sky. The land became drenched in a silvery blueness.

There was a growl, right in front other. She glimpsed yellow eyes, like two miniature suns.

She screamed. She picked up handfuls of dirt and threw them at the yellow eyes. There was a howl.

She turned and ran, not caring where she went. But her gait was waddling and stiff, her feet broken and sore.

She could hear steady, purposeful footsteps behind her.

Memories clattered through her mind: of a bite that had crushed the skull of a child in a moment, of the remains of a predator’s feast, bloody limbs and carcass, of the screams of a victim taken live to a nest, where cubs had fed long into the night. She screamed and ran and ran.

There was light ahead of her.

She ran towards the light, panting and hooting. She thought of daybreak in a safe tree top, her nest warm under her, her mother’s massive body close by.

The light was yellow, and it flickered, and shadows moved before it. A fire.

She heard those scampering footsteps. There was a hot, panting breath on her neck.

A stone zinged through the air, past her head. It clattered against a rock, harmlessly. Now another stone flew. It caught her in the chest, knocking her flat on her back.

Behind her, the chasing cat yelped and yowled. When she sat up and turned, she saw its lithe silhouette sliding across the blue, glittering grass.

“Elf Elf away.”

She yelled and scrabbled in the dirt.

She found herself looking up at a tall figure — a woman, perhaps twice as tall as she was, taller even than Big Boss had been, her torso long and ugly. She had small flat breasts. She was hairless, save for knots of hair on her head and between her legs. She had a small face and wide nose, and she carried a stick that she was pointing at Shadow.

She was a Runner.

Cautiously Shadow got to her feet. She jabbered at the woman, a series of intense pants, hoots, screeches and cries. She expected the woman to respond. They would chatter together, sounds without words, their cries slowly matching in pitch and intensity as they greeted each other.

But the woman jabbed with the stick, coming close to piercing Shadow’s skin. “Elf Elf away!”

Shadow feared the stick. But before her was the yellow fire. She could hear the fire pop and crackle, and she could smell food, the sharpness of leaves and burned meat. Many people were there — all tall and skinny and hairless like this stretched-out woman, but people nevertheless. Behind her there was only the darkness of the savannah, like a vast black mouth waiting to swallow her.

She took a pace towards the woman, hands outstretched. She tried to groom her, reaching for the hair on the woman’s head.

The sharp stick jabbed in her shoulder. Again Shadow was thrown back into the dirt. She poked a finger in her latest wound; blood seeped slowly from it, soaking her fur. She whimpered in misery. The sharp noses of the cats would soon detect the blood.

Still the woman stood over her, arms akimbo, stick poised for another thrust.

Shadow tried to stand. A searing pain clamped around her stomach, making her stumble to the crimson dirt. She cried out, and beat her fists on her betraying belly. She looked up at the threatening, curious woman. She whimpered. She held out her feet, and flexed her toes. Helpless, she was reduced to the gestures of an infant.

The woman lowered the stick. She crouched down. Clear eyes looked into Shadow’s. She reached out with her hand and stroked Shadow’s fur. She touched the wounded shoulder, and the hand came away bloody; the woman wiped it in the dirt at her feet. Then she ran a curious hand over the bump in Shadow’s belly.

Again Shadow reached for the woman’s scalp and crotch to groom her. But the woman flinched back.

Shadow dropped her head, her energy exhausted. She lay in the dirt, on her back, her arms and legs splayed; Shadow was beaten.

The woman stared at her a while longer. Then she walked away, towards the fire.

Shadow curled over on her side.

Something hit her chest. She flinched back.

It was a piece of meat. It lay on the ground before her. She saw it had been cut from an animal — perhaps an antelope — by a sharp-edged stone. And people had bitten into it already; she saw where it had been ripped and torn by teeth. But still it was meat, a piece as big as her hand. She crammed it into her mouth, tearing at it with hands and teeth.

When she was done she lay down once more. The ground was hard and dusty, and she longed for the springy platform of a nest. But her arm made a pillow for her head.

Suspended between black night and the flickering fire light, she sank into redness.

Reid Malenfant:

On the walk through the forest with McCann, this oddball English guy, Malenfant got fixated on McCann’s crossbow.

The crossbow, made purely of wood, was heavy. There was a long underslung trigger that neatly lifted a bowstring out of the notch. The trigger mechanism worked smoothly. The string itself was made of twisted vine, very fine, very strong. But there was no groove to direct the bolt. And the bolts themselves seemed crude to Malenfant: about as long as a pencil, but a lot thinner, and with a flight made from a single leaf, tucked into a slice in the wooden bolt, just one plane. It was hard to see how you could make an accurate shot with such a thing. But as they walked McCann did just that, over and over, apparently pleased to have an audience.

Nemoto’s silent contempt for all this was obvious. Malenfant didn’t care. His mind was tired of all the strangeness; to play with a gadget for a while was therapy.

It was getting dark by the time the Englishman led them to a fortress in the jungle. The two of them, bruised and bewildered, were led into the compound, taking in little. Surrounded by a tough-looking stockade, it turned out to be a place of straight lines and right angles, the huts lined up like ranks of soldiers, the line of the stockade walls as perfect as a geometrical demonstration.

“Shit,” murmured Malenfant. “I can feel my anus clench just standing here.”

Nemoto said, “They are very frightened, Malenfant. That much is clear.”

Malenfant glimpsed people moving to and fro in the gathering dark. No, not quite people. He shuddered.

McCann showed them hospitality, including food and generous draughts of some home-brew beer, thick and strong.

The hours passed in a blur.

He found himself in a sod hut, with Nemoto. His bed was a boxy frame containing a mattress of some vegetable fabric. It didn’t look too clean.

They were both fried. They hadn’t slept in around thirty-six hours. They had been through the landing, the assault by the Erectus types, the march through the jungle. And, frankly, the beer hadn’t helped. At least here, against all expectations, they had found what seemed like a haven. But still Malenfant inspected his lumpy bed suspiciously.

“I know what to do,” Malenfant said. “Always turn your mattress. Then the body lice have to work their way back up to get to you.” He lifted the corner of his mattress out of its wooden box.

“I would not do that,” Nemoto said; but it was too late.

There was the sound of fingernails on wood, a smell like a poultry shed. Cockroaches poured out of the box, a steady stream of them, each the size of a mouse.

“Shit,” Malenfant said. “There are thousands in there.” He stamped on one, briskly killing it.

“It’s best to leave them,” Nemoto said evenly. “They have glands on their backs. They only stink when disturbed.”

Malenfant cautiously picked up a cockroach. Its antenna and palps hung limp, and it had a pale pink band over its head and thorax.

“Very ancient creatures, Malenfant,” Nemoto said. “You find traces of them in Carboniferous strata, three hundred million years deep.”

“Doesn’t mean I want to share my bed with one,” Malenfant said. Carefully, as if handling a piece of jewellery, he set the cockroach on the floor. It scuttled out of sight under his bed frame.

Malenfant finally lowered his head to the pillow.

“Just think,” Nemoto said from the darkness. “When you sleep with that pillow, you sleep with all the people who used it before.”

Malenfant thought about that for a while. Then he dumped the pillow on the floor, rolled up his coverall, and stuck that under his head.

Later than night Malenfant was disturbed by a howl, like a lost child. Peering out, he spotted a small creature high in a palm tree, about the size of a squirrel.

“A hyrax,” Nemoto murmured. “Close to the common ancestor of elephants, hippos, rhinos, tapirs and horses.”

“Another ancient critter, crying in the night. I feel like I’ve been lost in this jungle since God was a boy.”

“I suspect we are very far from God. Try to get some sleep, Malenfant.”

Shadow:

Pain stabbed savagely in her lower belly. It awoke her from a crimson dream of teeth and claws. She sat up screaming.

There was no cat. In the grey-pink light of dawn, she was sitting in the dirt. She was immediately startled to find herself on the ground, and not high in a tree.

Before her she could see skinny people walking around, pissing, children tumbling sleepily. Some of them turned to stare at her with their oddly flat faces.

But now more pain came, great waves of it that tore at her as if her whole body was clenched in some huge mouth.

Something gushed from between her legs. She looked down, parting her fur. She saw bloody water, seeping into the ground. She screamed again.

She scrabbled at the ground, seeking to find a tree, her mother, seeking to get away from this dreadful, wrenching agony. But the pain came with her. Her belly flexed and convulsed, like huge stones moving around inside her, and she fell back once more.

Now there was a face over hers: smooth and flat, shadowed against the pinkish sky. Strong hands pressed at her shoulders, pushing her back against the dirt. She lashed out, trying to scratch this creature who was attacking her. But she was feeble, and her blows were easily brushed aside. She could feel more hands on her ankles, prising her legs apart, and she thought of Claw, and screamed again. But the pressure, though gentle, was insistent, and kick as she might she could not free herself of these grasping, controlling hands.

Now the pain pulsed again, a red surge that overwhelmed her.

No more than half-conscious, she barely glimpsed what followed: the strong, skilful hands of the Runner women as they levered the baby from its birth canal, fingers clearing a plug of mucus from its mouth, the brisk slicing of the umbilical with a stone axe. All that Shadow perceived was the pain, the way it washed over her over and over, receding at last as the baby was taken from her to be followed by a final agonizing pulse as the afterbirth emerged.

When it was done, Shadow struggled to prop herself up on her elbows. Her hair was matted with dust and blood. The ground between her legs was a mess of blood and mucus, drying in the gathering sunlight.

There were women around her, tall like tree trunks, their shadows long.

One of them — older, with silvery hair — was holding the afterbirth, which steamed gently. The old woman nibbled at it cautiously, and then, with a glance at Shadow, she ran away towards the smoking fire with her stolen treat.

The other women stared at Shadow’s face. Their small, protruding noses wrinkled. Now that the greater pain was ebbing, Shadow became aware of an itching that had spread across her cheeks and forehead and nose; she scratched it absently.

A woman stood before her. She held the baby, her long fingers clamped around its waist. It had large pink ears, small, pursed lips, and wrinkled, bluish-black skin. Its head was swollen, like a pepper. It — he — opened his mouth and wailed.

He smelled strange.

The skinny woman thrust the baby at Shadow, letting him drop on her belly. Feebly the baby grasped at her fur, mouth opening and closing with a pop.

With hesitant hands, Shadow picked him up around the waist. He wriggled feebly. She turned him around so his face was towards her, and pressed his face against her chest. Soon his mouth had found her nipple, and she felt a warm white gush course through her body.

But the baby smelled wrong. She could hardly bear even to hold him.

The Running-folk let her stay the rest of the day, and through the night. But they gave her no more food. And when dawn came, they drove her away with stones and yells.

Her baby clamped to her chest, its big awkward head dangling, Shadow walked unsteadily across the savannah, towards the wooded crater wall.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant woke to the scent of bacon.

He surfaced slowly. The smell took him back to Emma and the home they had made in Clear Lake, Houston, and even deeper back than that, to his parents, the sunlit mornings of his childhood.

But he wasn’t at home, in Clear Lake or anywhere else.

When he opened his eyes he found walls of smoothed-over turf all around him, a roof of crudely cut planking, the whole covered in a patina of smoke and age. Light streamed in through unglazed windows, just holes cut in the sod covered by animal skin scraped thin. Under the smell of the bacon he could detect the cool green earthy scent of forest.

The day felt hot already. Thin air, Malenfant: hot days, cold nights, like living at altitude.

Nemoto’s pallet was empty.

When he tried to sit up, pushing back the blankets of crudely woven fibre, his shoulder twinged sharply: injured, he was reminded, where a Homo erectus had thrown a stone at him, prior to trying to eat him.

He swung his legs out of bed. He was in his underwear, including his socks, and his boots were set neatly behind the hut’s small door. He could feel the ache of a faint hangover, and his mouth felt leathery. He remembered the beer he had consumed the night before, a rough, chewy ferment of some local vegetation, sluiced down from wooden cups.

The door opened, creaking on rope hinges. A woman walked in.

Malenfant snatched back the blankets, covering himself. She was short, squat, dressed in a blouse and skirt dyed a bright, almost comical yellow. Her face protruded beneath a heavy brow, but her hair was tied back neatly and adorned with flowers. She looked like a pro wrestler in drag. She curtsied neatly. She was carrying Malenfant’s coverall, which had been cleaned and patched at the shoulder. She put the coverall on his bed, and crossed to a small dresser, evidently home-made. There was a wooden bowl of dried flowers on top of the dresser. She scooped out the flowers and replaced them with a handful of pressed yellow blooms — marigolds, perhaps — that she drew from a pouch in her skirt. Her feet were bare, he saw, great spade-shaped toes protruding from under the skirt.

She curtsied again. “Breakfas’, Baas,” she said, her voice a gruff rasp. She had not once met his eyes. She turned to go out the door.

“Wait,” he said.

She stopped. He thought he saw apprehension in her stance, though she must have been twice his weight, and certainly had nothing to fear from him.

“What’s your name?”

“Julia.” It was difficult for her to make the “J” sound; it came out as a harsh squirt. Choo-li-a.

“Thanks for looking after me.”

She curtsied once again and walked stolidly out of the room, her big feet padding on the wooden floor.

The settlement consisted of a dozen huts, of cut sod or stacked logs, with roofs of thick green blankets of turf. The huts were a uniform size and laid out like a miniature suburban street. The central roadway was crimson dust beaten flat by the passage of many feet, and lined with heavy rocks. Around each of the huts a small area was cordoned off by more lines of rocks. Some of the rocks were painted white. In the “gardens” plants grew, vegetables and flowers, in orderly rows.

Crude-looking carts were parked in the shadow of one wall, and other bits of equipment — what looked like spades, hoes, crossbows — were stacked in neat piles under bits of treated skin. There was even a neat, orderly latrine system: trenches topped by little cubicles and wooden seats.

The effect was oddly formal, like a barracks, a small piece of a peculiarly ordered civilization carved out of the jungle, which proliferated beyond the tall stockade that surrounded the huts. Last night McCann had been apologetic about the settlement’s crudity, but with its vegetable-fibre clothing and carts and tools of wood and stone, it struck Malenfant as a remarkable effort by a group of stranded survivors to carve out of this unpromising jungle something of the civilization they had left behind.

But the huts” sod walls were eroded and heavily patched by mud. And several of the huts appeared abandoned, their walls in disrepair, their tiny gardens desiccated back to crimson dust.

There was nobody about — no humans, anyhow.

A man dressed in skins crossed the compound’s little street, barefoot, passing from one hut to another. He was broad, stocky, like Julia. A Neandertal, perhaps.

In one corner of the compound two men worked at a pile of rocks, steadily smashing them one against the other, as if trying to reduce them to gravel. The men were naked, powerful. Malenfant could immediately see they were the Homo erectus types. They were restrained by heavy ropes on their ankles, and they didn’t seem aware of his presence. The display of their strength, unaccompanied by the control of minds, disturbed him.

But he could still smell bacon. Comparative anthropology could wait.

He followed his nose to a hut at the centre of the compound. Within, a table had been set with wooden plates and cups and cutlery, and in a small kitchen area another Neandertal-type woman, older then Julia, was frying bacon on slabs of rock heated by a fire. In the circumstances, it seemed incredibly domesticated.

Nemoto was sitting at the table, chewing her way steadily through a slab of meat. She looked at him as he entered, and raised an eyebrow.

“…Malenfant. Good morning.”

Malenfant turned at the voice, and his hand was grasped firmly.

Hugh McCann was wearing a suit, Malenfant was startled to see, with a collared shirt and even a tie. But the suit and shirt were threadbare, and Malenfant saw how McCann’s belt dug into his belly.

McCann saw him looking. He said ruefully, “I never was much of a hand with the needle. And our bar-bar friends make fine cooks, but they don’t have much instinct for tailoring, I fear.”

Malenfant was fuddled by the scent of the food. “Bar-bars?”

“For barbarians,” Nemoto said, her mouth full. “The Neandertals.”

“They call themselves Hams,” McCann said. “A Biblical reference, of course. But bar-bars they were to me as a boy, and bar-bars they will always remain, I fear.” His accent was clearly British, but of a peculiarly strangulated type Malenfant hadn’t encountered outside of World War II movies. And he gave Malenfant’s name a strong French pronunciation. He took Malenfant’s elbow and guided him towards the kitchen area. “What can we offer you? The bacon comes from the local breed of hog, and is fairly authentic, but the bird who laid those eggs was no barnyard chicken: rather some dreadful flightless thing like a bush turkey. Still, the eggs are pretty tasty.” He flashed a smile at the Ham cook, showing decayed teeth.

First things first. Malenfant grabbed a plate and began to ladle it full of food. The wooden utensils were crude, but easy to use. He took his plate to the table, and sat with Nemoto, who was still eating silently. Malenfant sliced into his bacon. The well-cooked meat fell apart easily.

After a moment McCann joined them. “I expect last night is all a bit of a blur. You did rather go on a bust, Malenfant.”

“Body fluid redistribution,” Nemoto said dryly. “Low oxygen content. You just could not take it, Malenfant.”

“I’ll know better next time.”

“Runners,” Nemoto said.

“What?”

“The Erectus/Ergaster breed. Mr McCann calls them Runners — Running Men, Running-folk.”

“Quite a danger in the wild,” McCann said around a mouthful of bacon. “That scrog of wood where we found you was hotching with them. But once broken they are harmless enough. And useful. A body strong enough for labour, hands deft enough to handle tools, and yet without the will or wit to oppose a man’s commands — if backed up by a light touch of the sjambok from time to time…”

Nemoto leaned forward. “Mr McCann. You said that when you were a boy you called the Neandertals — that is, the Hams — bar-bars. So were there Hams in, umm, in the world you came from?”

McCann dug a fork into his scrambled egg, considering the question. He seemed more comfortable talking to Malenfant than to Nemoto, and he directed his remarks to him. “Look here,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, not yet. But I’m going to be honest with you from the start. I don’t mind telling you that yours are the first white faces we’ve seen since we’ve come here. Aside from those dreadful Zealot types, of course, but they’re no help to us, and beyond the pale anyhow… Yes,” he said. “Yes, there are Hams where I come from. There. That’s a straight answer to a straight question, and I trust you’ll treat me with the same courtesy.”

“Where?” Nemoto pressed. “Where are your Hams? In Europe, Asia—”

“Yes. Well, they are now. But not by origin, of course. The Hams came originally from the New World.”

Nemoto asked, “America?”

McCann frowned. “I don’t know that name.”

Malenfant eyed Nemoto. “What are you thinking?”

“An alternate Earth,” Nemoto said simply.

Yes, he thought. McCann had come from an Earth, a different Earth, a world where Neandertals had survived to the present — a world where pre-European America had been in the occupation, not of a branch of Homo sapiens, but of another species of humankind altogether, a different flesh… What an adventure that must have been, Malenfant thought, for a different Columbus.

Nemoto said softly, “I think we may be dealing with a whole sheaf of worlds here, Malenfant. And all linked by this peculiar wandering Red Moon.”

McCann was listening intently Malenfant saw how deeply cut were the lines in his face, he might have been fifty, but he looked older, careworn, intense, lit by a kind of desperation. He said, “You believe we come from different worlds.”

“Different versions of Earth,” Nemoto said.

He nodded. “And in this Earth of yours, there are no Hams?”

“No,” Nemoto said steadily.

“Well, we have no Runners. The Runners may be native to this place, perhaps.” He eyed them sharply. “And what about the others, the Elf-folk and the Nutcrackers…”

Malenfant said, “If you mean other breeds of hominids, or pre-homimds — no. Nothing between us and the chimps. The chimpanzees.”

McCann’s eyes opened wider. “How remarkable. How — lonely.”

The Neandertal woman, with a bulky grace, came to the table and began to gather up their dishes.

They walked around the compound.

There was very little metal here: a few knives, bowls, shears. These tools, it seemed, had been cut from the wreck of the ship that had brought McCann and his colleagues here: like Nemoto and Malenfant, the English had got here under their own power. So the tools were irreplaceable and priceless — and they were a target for steady theft, by Hams within and without the compound. McCann said the Hams did not use the tools; they seemed to destroy them or bury them, removing this trace of novelty from the world.

There were many Hams, working as servants. And there appeared to be several of the so-called Runners, kept under control at all times, apparently domiciled outside the main stockade. He tried to put aside judgement. He was not the one who had battled to survive here for so long; and it was evident that this McCann and his companions came from a very different world from his.

And besides, McCann appeared to believe that he treated “his” hominids well.

They met one other of the English, a bloated-looking red-faced man with a Santa Claus beard and an immense pot belly that protruded from the grimy, much-patched remnant of a shirt. He was riding in a cart drawn by two of the Runners, harnessed with strips of leather like pack animals. Santa Claus glared at Malenfant and Nemoto as he passed them, and then went riding out of the stockade through gates smoothly pulled back by Hams.

“There goes Crawford in his Cape cart,” whispered McCann conspiratonally. “Something of an oddball, between you and me. Well, we all are, I suppose, after all this time. I fear he’s too much set in his ways to deal with you. Of course if he suspected you were French he’d shoot you where you stand!… Martyr to his lumbago, poor chap. And I fear he may have a touch of the black-water.”

McCann talked quickly and fluently, as if he had been too long alone.

There had been twelve of them, it seemed — all men, all British, from an Empire that had thrived longer than in Malenfant’s world. Their rocket ship had been driven by something called a Darwin engine.

McCann struggled to describe the history of his world, his nation. After bombarding them with a lot of detail, names of wars and kings and generals and politicians that meant nothing to Malenfant, he settled on a blunt summary.

“We are engaged in a sort of global war,” McCann said. “That’s been the shape of it for a couple of centuries now. Our forefathers struck out for new lands, in Asia and Africa and Australia — even the New World — as much out of rivalry as for expectations of gain.”

But the ultimate “new land” had always hovered in the sky. Before the Red Moon had appeared in McCann’s sky, a Moon had sailed there — not tiny Luna, but a much fatter world, a world of water-carved canyons and aquifers and dust storms, a world that sounded oddly like Mars. Drawn by that Moon, the great nations of this other Earth had launched themselves into a space race as soon as the technology was available, decades before Malenfant’s history had caught up.

Malenfant, battered by strangeness, found room for a twinge of nostalgia. He’d have exchanged McCann’s fat Moon for Luna any time. If only a world like Mars had been found to orbit the Earth, instead of poor desiccated Luna — a world with ice and air, just waiting for an explorer’s tread! With such a world as a lure, just three days away from Earth, how different history might have been. And how differently his own life, and Emma’s, might have turned out.

“The lure of the Moon was everything, of course,” McCann said. “From times before memory it has floated in the sky, fat and round and huge, with storms and ice caps and even, perhaps, traces of vegetation, visible with the naked eye. You could see it was another world in the sky, waiting for the tread of man, for the flag of empire, the ploughs of farmers… It was quite a chase. Got to stop the other chap getting there first, you see.”

Malenfant was getting confused again. “Other chap? You mean the Americans?”

Nemoto said gently, “There are no Americans in his world, Malenfant.”

“The French, of course,” said McCann. “The blooming French!”

Colonies on this bounteous Moon had been founded in what sounded like the equivalent of the first half of the twentieth century. Since then wars had already been fought, wars on the Moon waged between spreading mini-empires of Brits and French and Germans.

But then, in McCann’s universe, the Mars-Moon had disappeared, to be replaced by this peculiar, wandering Red Moon, with its own cargo of oceans and life. Once the world had gotten over its bewilderment — once the last hope of contacting the lost colonies on Mars-Moon was gone — a new race had begun to plant a flag in the Red Moon.

“…Or Lemuria, as we call it,” McCann said.

Nemoto said, “A lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean, once thought to have been the cradle of mankind.”

McCann talked on: of how the dozen men had travelled here; of a disastrous landing that had wrecked their ship and killed three of them; of how they had sent heliograph and radio signals home and waited for rescue — and of how their Earth had flickered out of the sky, to be replaced by another, and another.

“A sheaf of worlds,” murmured Nemoto, gazing at McCann.

When it was clear that no rescue was to come, some of the exploratory party had submitted to despair. One committed suicide. Another handed himself over to a party of Elf-folk for a hideous and protracted death.

The survivors had recruited local Hams, and used their muscles and Runner labour to construct this little township. They had found no others of their kind, save for the sinister-sounding Zealots, of whom McCann was reluctant to speak, who lived some distance from the compound.

It seemed that it had been the mysterious Zealots who had taught the indigenes their broken English — if inadvertently, through escaped slaves returning to their host populations. The Zealots had been here for centuries, McCann seemed to believe.

“Not much of a life,” McCann said grimly. “No women, you see. Some of us sought relief with the Hams, even with Runners. But they aren’t women. And there were certainly no children to follow.” He smiled stoically. “Without women and children, you can’t make a colony, can you? After a time you wonder why you bother to shave every day.”

One by one the Englishmen had died, their neat little huts falling into disrepair.

McCann showed them a row of graves, outside the stockade gate, marked by bits of stone. The last to die had been a man called Jordan— ‘dead of paralytic shock’, McCann said. McCann appeared especially moved to be at Jordan’s grave side. Malenfant wondered if these withdrawn, lonely men, locked in civility and their memories of a forever lost home, had in the end sought consolation in each other.

But McCann, in a gruesome effort to play the good host, talked brightly of better times. “We had a life of sorts. We played cards — until they wore out and we made chess sets, carving pieces from bits of balsa. We had no books, but we would spin each other yarns, recounting the contents of novels as best we remembered them. I dare say the shades of a few authors are restless at the liberties we took. Once or twice we even put on a play or two. Marlowe comedies mostly: Much Ado About Nothing, that kind of thing. Just to amuse ourselves, of course.

“We used to play sports. Your average Ham can’t kick a soccer ball to save his life, but he’s a formidable rugby player. As for the Runners, they can’t grasp the simplest principle of rules or sportsmanship. But, my, can they run! We would organize races. The record we got was under six seconds for the hundred yard dash. That fellow was rewarded with plenty of bananas and beer…”

McCann spoke of how the survivors, just four of them, had become withdrawn, even one from the other, as they waited gloomily for death. Crawford would disappear into the forest for days on end with squads of Hams, “fossicking around’, as McCann put it. The others would rarely even leave their huts.

“And you?” Nemoto asked. “What is your eccentricity, Mr McCann?”

“A longing for company,” he said immediately, smiling with self-deprecation. “That’s always been my weakness, I’m afraid.”

“Then it must have been hard for you here,” Malenfant said.

“Indeed. But when my companions withdrew into themselves, I sought out the company of the lesser folk: the Hams, even the Runners at times. My companions took to calling me Mowgli. Perhaps you know the reference. I have attempted to civilize them, teach them skills — more advanced tool-making, even reading. With little success, I am afraid. Your bar-bar is smarter than your Runner, and these pre-sapients are smarter in turn than the pongid species, the Elves and Nutcrackers. Your bar-bar can be taught to use a new tool, you know — to use it but never to make it. They can make things work but never understand how they work, rather like human infants. And, like your Kaffir, your bar-bar can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more.

“And that, of course, is the difference between man and pre-sapient. Wherever there are sub-men, who live only for the day and their own bellies, we must rule. But the work shapes one. The responsibility. It has made me pitiful and kindly, I would say, as I have learned something of their strange, twisted reasoning.” He leaned towards them. “They have no chins, you see, none of them. And everybody knows that a weak chin generally denotes a weak race.”

When evening came again, fires were built within the palm-thatched huts, and smoke rose through the roofs and the crude chimneys that pierced them. Malenfant saw a pair of bats, flapping uncertainly between the turbulent columns of smoke. They were big, as big as crows, with broad, rounded wings.

“Leaf-nose bats,” Nemoto murmured.

“Don’t tell me. Prehistoric bats.”

Nemoto shrugged. “Perhaps. There are many bats here. They have occupied some of the niches never taken by the birds.”

Malenfant watched the bats” slow, ungainly flapping. “They sure look unevolved.”

“Ah, but they were the peak of aerial engineering when they hunted flies and mosquitoes over lakes full of dinosaurs, Malenfant. You should have a little more respect.”

“I guess I should.”

Nemoto whispered conspiratorially, “It all hangs together, Malenfant.”

“What does?”

“McCann’s account of his alternate Earth. A much larger Moon would raise immense tides. The oceans would not be navigable. McCann’s America must once have been linked to Eurasia by land bridges, as ours was, for otherwise the Hams presumably couldn’t have reached it. But when the land bridges were submerged, the Americas were effectively cut off — until iron-hulled ships and aeroplanes emerged, in the equivalent of our own twentieth century. Malenfant, it may have been easier to fly to the Moon than to reach America. Think of that.”

“What does all this mean, Nemoto?”

“I am working on it,” she said seriously. “Consider this, though. We are alone on our Earth, our closest relatives terribly distant. But McCann’s world has a spectrum of hominid types — as it was on our own Earth, long ago. McCann’s Earth may in some senses be more typical than ours.”

A party of Runners, supervised by a Ham, brought in a couple of deer, slung between them, half-butchered.

“Look at that,” muttered Nemoto. “I think that one is a mouse deer.” It was small, the size of a dog, its coat yellow-brown spotted with white, and it had tusks in its upper jaw. “You see them in Africa. Actually it isn’t really a deer at all. It is midway between pigs and deer, and more primitive than either. It climbs trees. It catches fish in the streams. Probably unchanged across thirty million years. Older than grass, Malenfant.”

“And the other?”

This was a little larger than the mouse deer, with a black stripe down its back, and powerful hind legs: a creature evolved for the undergrowth, Malenfant thought.

“A duiker, I think,” Nemoto said. “Another primitive form, the oldest of the antelopes. Sometimes hunts birds and feeds on carrion. Maybe here it eats bats. Everything is ancient here.” Now she seemed agitated. “Perhaps these forms were brought here by the same mechanism that imported hominids. What do you think?”

“Take it easy.”

Her small, thin face worked in the gathering gloom. “This is wrong, Malenfant.”

“Wrong? What’s wrong with it?”

“The ecology is — out of tune. Like a misfiring engine. It is a jumble of species and micro-ecologies, a mixed-up place, fragments thrown together. Though many of the fragments are very ancient, there has been no time for these plants and animals to evolve together, to find an equilibrium. Periodically something disturbs this world, Malenfant, over and over, stirring it up.”

Malenfant grunted. “Guess you can’t go wandering across the reality lines without a little confusion.”

But Nemoto would not take the matter lightly. “This is not right, Malenfant. All this mixing. There is a reason the primitive hominids became extinct, a reason why the mouse deer’s descendants evolved new forms. An ecology is like a machine, where all parts work together, interlocking. You see?”

Malenfant said, amused, “These deer and antelopes seem to have been prospering before they ran into some hunter’s crossbow bolt.”

“It shouldn’t be this way, Malenfant. To meddle with ecologies, to short-circuit them, is irresponsible.”

Malenfant shrugged. “Sure. And we cut down the forests to build shopping malls.” He was feeling restless; maybe his first shock was wearing off. He’d had enough of McCann; he was eager to get out of here, get back to the lander — and progress his primary mission, which was to find Emma.

But when he expressed this to Nemoto she laughed harshly. “Malenfant, we barely managed to survive our first few minutes after landing. Here we are safe. Have patience.”

He seethed. But without her support, he didn’t see what he could do about it.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

When she was Mapped to the Market — when the information that comprised her had been squeezed through cracks in the quantum foam that underlay all space and time — she was no longer, quite, herself, and that disturbed her greatly.

Manekato was used to Mapping. The Farm was large enough that walking, or transport by Workers, was not always rapid enough. But Mappings covering such a short distance were brief and isomorphic: she felt the same coming out of the destination station as entering it (just as, of course, principles of the identity of indiscernible objects predicted she should).

A Mapping spanning continents was altogether more challenging. To compensate for differences in latitude and altitude and seasons — early summer there, falling into autumn here — and to adjust for momentum differences — people on the far side of the spinning Earth were moving in the opposite direction to her — such a Mapping could be no more than homomorphic. What came out looked like her, felt like her. But it was not indiscernible from the original; it could not be her.

Still, despite these philosophical drawbacks, the process was painless, and when she walked off the Mapping platform, her knuckles tentatively touching new ground, she found herself comfortable. The air was hot, humid, but caused her no distress, and even its thinness at this higher altitude did not give her any discomfort.

And the air was still. There was no Wind. Thanks to the Air Wall wrapped around it, the Market was the only place on Earth from which the perpetual Wind was excluded. She had been prepared for this intellectually, of course. But to stand here in this pond of still air — not to feel the caressing shove of the Wind on her back — was utterly strange.

This crowded Mapping station was full of strangers. She peered around, feeling conspicuous, bewildered. Some of the people here were small, some tall, some squat, some thin; some were coated with hair that was red or black or brown, and some had no hair at all;

some crawled close to the ground, and some almost walked upright, like their most distant ancestors, their hands barely brushing the ground. Manekato, who had spent her whole life on a Farm where everybody looked alike, tried to mask her shock and revulsion at so much difference.

She was met outside the station by a Worker, a runner from the Astrologers. She slid easily onto its broad back, wrapping her long arms around its chest, and allowed herself to be carried away.

Her first impression of the Market was of waste. The streets were broad, the buildings an inefficient variety of designs, and she could spot immediately places where heat would leak or dust gather, or where the layout must prevent optimally short journeys from being concluded.

All of this jarred with her instinct. The goal for every Farmer was to squeeze the maximum effectiveness and efficiency from every last atom — and beyond, to the infinitesimal. The mastery of matter at the subatomic level, resulting in such everyday wonders as Mapping and Workers, had brought that ultimate dream a little closer.

But, she reminded herself, this was the Market, not a Farm.

In the deepest past there had been a multitude of markets, where Farmers traded goods and information and wisdom. The transient population of the markets had always been predominantly male. Women were more tightly bound to the land, locked into the matriarchal Lineages that had owned the land since the times almost before history; men were itinerant, sent to other Farms for the purpose of trade, and marriage.

But as technology had advanced and the Farms had become increasingly self sufficient, the primary function of the markets had dwindled. One by one they had fallen into disuse. But the role of the markets as centres of innovation had been recognized — and, perhaps, their purpose in providing an alternate destiny for rootless men and boys. So some of the markets had been preserved.

At last only one Market remained: the grandest and most famous, perched here on the eroded peak of its equatorial mountain, supported now by tithes from Farms around the world. Here men, and a few women, dreamed their dreams of how differently things might be — and enough of those innovative dreams bore fruit that it was worth preserving.

It had been this way for two hundred thousand years.

The Worker carried her away from the Market’s crowded centre towards its fringe. The crowds thinned out, and Manekato felt a calming relief to be alone. Alongside an impossibly tall building the Worker paused and hunched down, letting her slip to the ground.

A door dilated in the side of the building. She glanced into the interior; it was filled with darkness.

Reluctant to enter immediately, she loped further along the gleaming, dust-free road. Not far beyond the building the ground fell away. She was approaching the rim of the summit plateau, worn smooth by the feet and hands of visitors. She leaned forward curiously. The mountain’s shallow flanks fell away into thicker, murky air; far below she glimpsed green growing things.

And she saw the Air Wall.

It was like a bank of windblown cloud, moving swiftly, grey and boiling. But this cloud bank hung vertically from the sky, and the clouds streamed horizontally past her. Now that it was not masked. by the buildings she could see how the great Wall curved around the mountain-top, enclosing it neatly. It stretched down like a curtain to the ground below, where dust storms perpetually beat against the struggling vegetation, and it stretched up towards the sky.

It was not easy for her to look up, for her back tilted forward, and her neck was thick, heavily muscled, adapted to fight the Wind. Besides, at home there was generally nothing to see but a lid of streaked, scudding cloud. But now she tipped back awkwardly, raising her chinless jaw.

It was like peering up into a tunnel, lined by scraps of hurrying cloud. And at the very end of the tunnel there was a patch of clear blue.

She had never before seen the sky beyond the clouds.

She shuddered. She hurried inside the building.

And there she met her brother.

Reid Malenfant:

While he waited for an opportunity to progress his mission, Malenfant ate and drank as much as he could, and after the first day put his body through some gentle exercise. He stretched and pushed up and pounded around the red dust of the neat little stockade in his vest and shorts, while Ham servants watched with a kind of absent curiosity, and Runners hooted and shook their shackling ropes. The low gravity made him feel stronger, but conversely the reduced oxygen content of the low-pressure air weakened him. If he over-exerted himself he would soon run out of air; his chest would ache, and, in the worst cases, black spots would gather around his vision.

But he would adapt. And for now, it did no harm to test his limits.

McCann took him for tourist-guide jaunts around the compound, and even beyond. He seemed childishly eager to show off what he and his companions had built here.

McCann said the English had tried to mine mudstone — a kind of natural brick so as to build better houses. “We have the raw muscle, among the Runners and the Hams,” McCann said. “That’s fine for hauling, lifting and dragging. But they can’t be set to fine work, Malenfant; not without a man’s constant supervision. You certainly can’t send off a party even of the Hams to a mudstone seam and expect them to return with anything but a jumble of gouged-out, misshapen rocks — nothing like bricks, you see — that’s if they bring back anything at all.”

There were a lot of pleasurable knick-knacks to inspect, constructed over long hours by the ingenious hands of these bored Englishmen. Malenfant, a gadget fan, pored over wooden locks, clocks and slide rules, all made entirely of wood.

McCann had even maintained a crude calendar system — though it was little more than marks on wood. “Like a rune staff,” McCann said, grimacing. “How far we have fallen. But we haven’t quite mastered the knack of paper-making, you see; needs must. And besides this wandering world has a damnably irregular sky. Even the stars swim about sometimes, you know. But we try to impose order. We do try.”

Everything was made of wood, or stone, or bone, or material manufactured from vegetable products. You could make rope, for instance, from birch bark, pine roots or willow. Ham women baked pine bread made from phloem, the soft white flesh just inside the tree’s bark. You could drink the sap of birch trees, if you had to. And there were medicinal products: spruce resin to ease gut ache. And so on.

McCann said, “This benighted world is bereft of metals, you see — of sizeable ore lodes, anyhow, so far as we could find. Of course the very dust is iron oxide — hematite, I think — but we have notably failed to establish a workable extraction regime… It was an early disappointment, and all the more severe for that. And we were reluctant to mine the only source of refined metals here — I mean our ship, of course. As long as we clung to hope that we might escape this jungle world, we were reluctant to turn our only vessel into pots and pans. All seems a little foolish now, doesn’t it? And so ours is an economy of stone and wood. We have become like our woad-wearing forebears. Amusing, isn’t it?”

They came to a hut where a Ham woman, somewhat bent, was ladling water from a wooden bucket at her feet. Malenfant, glimpsing machinery, poked his head inside the hut, and allowed his eyes to adjust to the shade.

A big wooden container sat on a stand above a smouldering fire. There was some kind of mash inside the container: the woman showed him, though she had to remove a lid sealed with some kind of wax to do it. Two narrow bamboo pipes led down from the container. Condenser pipes, Malenfant thought. The pipes finished in v-notches that tipped their contents neatly into gourds…

“It’s a still,” Malenfant breathed. “Holy shit. Hillbilly stuff. Just the way Jack Daniels started. God, I love this stuff.”

McCann preened, inordinately proud; briefly Malenfant was taken back to his pre launch inspections at Vandenberg and elsewhere.

Immediately outside the stockade the forest seemed sparse. The leaves were a pale green, lighter than usual, and lianas tangled everywhere, irregular. Though there were sudden patches of shade, much of the ground was open to the sun; there was no solid canopy here.

This area had been cleared, Malenfant realized — twenty, thirty years ago? — and then abandoned. And now, oblivious to the failed ambitions of the stranded English, the forest was claiming back the land. He gazed at the ground, and thought he discerned the straight-line edges of forgotten fields, like Roman ruins.

But even out here there were signs of rudimentary industry. A charcoal pile had been constructed: just a heap of logs with earth piled over the top, steadily burning. And there was a tar pit, a hole in the ground filled with pine logs, buried under a layer of earth. The logs burned steadily, and crude wooden guttering brought out the tar.

They came to a stand of small oil-palm trees that clung to the banks of a stream. They were slim and upright with scruffy green fronds, holding onto the slope with prop-roots, like down-turned fingers curling out from the base of their pale grey trunks. Under the direction of one or two of the Hams, Runner workers gathered oil from the flesh of the nut and the kernel of the seeds, and sap from shallow cuts near the trees” bases.

. “You cook with the oil, or you make soap with it,” McCann said. “And if you were to hang a bucket under that cut in the trunk you’d be rewarded by ready made palm wine, Malenfant. Nature is bountiful sometimes, even here. Though it takes human ingenuity to exploit it to the full, of course.”

McCann even showed Malenfant the poignant ruin of a windmill. Crudely constructed, it was a box of wood already overgrown by vegetation and with daylight showing through cracks in its panels. Later McCann showed him elaborate drawings, crammed into the blank pages of yellowing log books. There had been ambitious schemes for different designs of mills — ‘magpie mills’ with a tail to turn into the wind, and even a water mill — none of them realized. “We never had the labour, you see. Your Ham or your Runner is strong as an ox. But you can’t teach him to build, or to maintain, anything more complex than a hand-axe or a spear. He will go where you tell him, do what you tell him, but no more; he has no initiative or advanced skill, not a scrap. One had to oversee everything, every hand turned to the work. After a time — well, and with no hope for the future — one rather became disheartened.”

McCann was obviously desperate for company, and it was hard to blame him. He challenged Malenfant to a game of chess — which Malenfant refused, never having grasped the game. Despite this McCann set out crudely carved wooden pieces, and moved them around the board in fast, well-practised openings. “I played a lot with old Crawford before he lost his wits. I do miss the game. I even tried to teach the bar-bars to play! — but though they appear capable of remembering the moves of the pieces, not even the brightest of them, even Julia, could grasp its essence, the purpose. Still, I would have Julia or another sit where you are sitting, Malenfant, and serve as a sort of token companion as I played out solitary games…”

As he pushed the pieces around the board McCann bombarded Malenfant with anecdotes and memories, of his time here on the Red Moon and on his own lost version of Earth.

But the talk was unsatisfactory. They were exiles from different versions of parallel Earths. They could compare notes on geography and the broad sweep of history, but they had no detail in common. None of the historical figures in. their worlds seemed to map across to each other. Although McCann seemed to follow a variant of Christianity — something like Calvinism, so far as Malenfant could determine — his “Christ” was not Jesus, but a man called John; “Christian” translated, roughly, to “Johannen’.

No doubt all this was fascinating as a study of historical inevitability. But it made for lousy small talk. McCann strove to mask his profound disappointment that Malenfant was not from the home where he had left a wife and child, a family from whom he had not heard since their world had disappeared from the sky.

Conversely Malenfant told McCann what he could of Emma, and asked if anyone like her had shown up, here on the Red Moon. But McCann seemed to know little of what went on beyond the limits of the stockade, and the scrap of Red Moon he and his colleagues controlled. Malenfant, frustrated, realized afresh he was going to have to find Emma alone.

McCann said now, “Solitary, seeking diversion, I discovered the intricate delights of the knight’s tour.” He swept the board empty of pieces, save for a solitary knight, which he made hop in its disturbingly asymmetrical fashion from square to square. “The knight must move from square to square over an empty board, touching all the cells, but each only once. An old schoolboy puzzle… I quickly discovered that a three-by-four board is the smallest on which such a tour can be made. I have discovered many tours on the standard chessboard, many of which have fascinating properties. A closed tour, for example, starts and ends at the same cell.” The knight moved around the board with bewildering rapidity. “I do not know how many tours are possible. I suspect the number may be infinite.” He became aware of Malenfant’s uncomfortable silence.

Malenfant tried to soften his look — how sane would you be after so many decades alone on Neandertal Planet, Malenfant?

Embarrassed, McCann swept the pieces into a wooden box. “Rather like our situation here, don’t you think?” he said, forcing a smile. “We move from world to world with knight’s hops, forward a bit and sideways. We must hope our tours are closed too, eh?”

After the first night McCann gave the two of them separate huts. In this dwindling colony there was plenty of room.

Malenfant found it impossible to sleep. Lying in his battered sod hut, he gazed through his window as the night progressed.

He heard the calls of the predators as the last light faded. Then there was an utter stillness, as if the world were holding its breath — and then a breath of wind and a coolness that marked the approaching dawn.

Malenfant wasn’t used to living so close to nature. He felt as if he were trapped within some vast machine.

His head rattled with one abortive scheme after another. He was a man who was used to taking control of a situation, of bulling his way through, of pushing until something gave. This wasn’t his world, and he had arrived here woefully ill-equipped; he still couldn’t see any way forward more promising than just pushing into the forest on foot, at random. He had to wait, to figure out the situation, to find an option with a reasonable chance of success. But still his enforced passivity was burning him up.

The door opened.

The Neandertal girl came into his hut. She was carrying a bowl of water that steamed softly, a fresh towel, a jug that might hold nettle tea.

He said softly, “Julia.”

She stood still in the grey dawn light, the glow from the window picking out the powerful contours of her face. “Here, Baas.”

“Do you know what’s going on here?”

She waited.

He waved a hand. “All of this. The Red Moon. Different worlds.”

“Ask Ol” Ones,” she said softly.

“Who?”

Th” Ol” Ones. As” them wha” for.”

“The Old Ones? Where do they live?”

She shrugged, her shoulders moving volcanically. “In th” ol’est place.”

He frowned. “What about you, Julia?”

“Baas?”

“What do you want?”

“Home,” she said immediately.

“Home? Where is home?”

She pointed into the sky. “Grey Earth.”

“Does Mr McCann know you want to go home?”

She shrugged again. “Born here.”

“What?”

She pointed to herself. “Born here. Mother. Moth” born here.”

“Then this is your home, with Mr McCann.”

She shook her head, a very human gesture. She pointed again to the forest, and the sky.

Then she said, “You, Baas? What you wan’?”

He hesitated. “I came looking for my wife.”

Her face remained expressionless. But she said, “Fam’ly.”

“Yes. I guess so. Emma is my family. I came here looking for her.”

“Lon” way.”

“Yes. Yes, it was a long way. And I ain’t there yet.”

She walked towards him, rummaging in the pouch of her skirt. “Thomas,” she said.

“I know him. He found me.”

“Took off of Runner in fores’.” She held out something in the dark, something small and jewel-like that glittered in her palm.

He took it, held it up to the light of the window. It was a hand-lens, badly scuffed, snapped off at its mount. It was marked with the monogram of the South African air force.

“Emma,” he breathed. He was electrified. So there were indeed things McCann didn’t know, even about the Hams of his own household. “Julia, where—”

But she had gone.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

“I have three wives and six children. That is how it is done in my new home…” Babo was talking fast, nervously, and his knuckles rattled as he walked with her through the tall dark halls of the building. His body hair was plaited and coloured in a fashion that repelled Mane’s simple Poka tastes. “The Farm is fine, Mane, and bigger than that of the Poka Lineage, but its design is based on the triangle: plane-covering, of course, but cramped and cluttered compared to Poka’s clean-lined hexagons.”

“You always were an aesthete,” she said dryly.

This whole building, she realized slowly, was a store of records piled up high from the lowest room to the highest. Physically, some of the records were stored in twinkling cubes that held bits of the quantum foam, minuscule wormholes frozen into patterns of meaning; and some were scraped onto parchment and animal skin.

“Some of these pieces are very ancient indeed,” Babo said. “Dating back half a million years or more. And the Air Wall, you know, is a controlled storm. It is like a hurricane, but trapped in one place by subtle forces. It has raged here, impotent, for fifty thousand years — so that for all that time the Market has been in the eye of the storm — an eye that reveals the sky beyond the clouds, a sky opened for the study of the Astrologers…”

She stopped and glared at him. “Oh, Babo, I don’t want to know about Air Walls or records! I never thought I would see you again — I didn’t know you had become an Astrologer.”

He sighed, ruminatively picking his nose. “I am no Astrologer. But the Astrologers sent for me. When I was younger I did spend some time here, working informally, before I reached the home of my wives. Many boys do, Mane. You matriarchs run the world, but there is much you do not know, even about those who sire your children!”

“Why are you here, Babo?”

He wrapped his big hands over his head. “Because the Astrologers thought it would be kinder that way. Kinder if your brother told you the news, rather than a stranger…”

“What news?”

He grabbed her hand, pulling her. “Come see the sky with me. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Reluctantly, she followed.

The building was tall, and they had a long way to ascend. At first they used simple short-range isomorphic Mappers, but soon they came to more primitive parts of the building, and they had to climb, using rungs stapled to walls of crude bricks.

Babo led the way. “A remarkable thing,” he called down to her. “We find climbing easy; our arms are strong, our feet well adapted to grasping. But it appears that our climbing ancestors evolved into creatures that, for a time, walked upright, on their hind feet. You can see certain features of the position of the pelvis — well. But we have given that up too; now, once more, we walk on all fours, using our knuckles, clinging to the ground.”

“If you tried to walk upright you would be knocked over by the Wind.”

“Of course, of course — but then why is it we carry traces of a bipedal ancestry? We are creatures of anomaly, Mane. We are not closely related to any of the animals on this Earth of ours — not one, not above a certain basic biochemical equivalence of course, without which we could not eat our food and would quickly starve to death. We can trace evolutionary relationships among all the world’s creatures, one related to the other in a hierarchy of families and phyla — except us. We seem to be unique, as if we fell out of the sky. We have no evolutionary forebears, no bones in the ground that might mark the passing of those who came before us.

“Is it possible we evolved somewhere else? — a place where the Wind did not blow so strongly, where it was possible to walk upright?”

“What sort of place? And how could we have got here from there?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the pattern of the bones, the biochemistry, is unmistakable.”

“Idle speculation, Babo, won’t germinate a single seed.”

“A Farmer’s practical reply,” he said sadly. “But we are surrounded by mystery, Manekato. The Astrologers hope that your mission will settle some of these fundamental quandaries. Oh, please keep climbing, dear Mane! We are soon there, and I will tell you everything.”

With bad grace, clinging to the rungs with feet and hands, she continued her ascent.

They reached a platform, open to the sky. But there was no breeze, and the air felt as warm as it had inside the tower.

Babo walked around nervously, peering into the sky. “It is darkling already. Our days are short, because the planet spins quickly — did you ever reflect on that. Mane? It didn’t have to be so. Earth could spin more slowly, and we would have leisurely days, and — oh, look!” He pointed with a long stabbing finger. “Look, a star!”

She peered up awkwardly. There was a single bright star, close to the zenith, set against the deepening blue of the sky.

“How strange,” Babo breathed, “that before the first tentative Mappings no human eye saw a star.”

Manekato grunted. “What of it? Stars are trivial. You don’t need to see them.”

That was true, of course. Every child was expected to figure out the stars.

When Manekato was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects: a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

Of course the results of such trials varied — in fact the variations were often interesting, offering insights into scientific understanding, the nature of reality, the psychology of the developing mind. But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.

Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.

“Ah, but the detail is everything,” Babo said, “and that you can never predict, of course. That and the beauty. That was quite unexpected, to me. Oh, and one other thing. The emptiness of the universe…”

Manekato’s childhood cohort, like most others, had concluded — groping with an intuition of uniformity — that if this world was inhabited, and the universe was large — well, then, there must be many inhabited planets. She recalled what a great and unwelcome surprise it had been to learn that that was not true: that, as far as could be discerned, the universe was empty of the organization that would have marked the work of intelligence.

“It is a deep, ancient mystery,” Babo said. “Why do we see no Farms in the sky? Of course we are a sedentary species, content to cultivate our Farms. But not every species need have the same imperatives as us. Imagine an acquisitive species, that covets the territory of others.”

She thought it through quickly. “That is outlandish and unlikely. Such a species would surely destroy itself in fratricidal battles, as the illogic of its nature worked itself out.”

“Perhaps. But wouldn’t we see the flaring of the wars, the mighty ruins they left behind? We should see them. Mane.”

She snapped, “Babo, get to the point.”

He sighed and came to squat before her. Gently he groomed her, picking imaginary insects from her coat, as he had when they were children. “Mane, dear Mane, the Astrologers have read the stars…”

The word “astrology’, in Manekato’s ancient, rich language, derived from older roots meaning “the word of the stars’. Here astrology had absorbed astronomy and physics and other disciplines; here astrology was no superstition, no foolishness, but one of the fundamental sciences. For if the universe was empty of mind save for humans, then the courses of the stars could have no meaning save for their role in the affairs of humanity.

And now, Babo said, the Astrologers, peering into the sky and poring over records dozens of millennia deep, had discerned a looming threat.

Joshua:

Mary was in oestrus. The scent of her seemed to fill the air of the hut, and the head of every man.

Joshua longed for the time of her blood to pass, and she and the other women could recede to the grey periphery of his awareness. For the deep ache aroused by Mary distracted him from the great conundrum which plagued him.

Over and over he thought of the great blue wings he had seen falling from the sky, bearing that fat black and white seed to its unknown fate in the forest at the top of the cliff. He had never seen such a thing before. What was it?

Joshua’s was a world that did not countenance change. And yet, a stubborn awareness told him, there was change. Once the people had lived on the Grey Earth. Now they lived here. So the past contained a change. And now the black and white seed had fallen from the sky, and whatever grew from it surely marked change to come in the future as well.

Change in the past, change in the future.

Joshua, helplessly conservative himself, had an instinctive grasp of parsimony: his world contained two extraordinary events — Grey Earth and sky seed — and surely they must be linked. But how? The elements of the conundrum revolved in his head.

Joshua had solved puzzles before.

Once, as a boy, he had found a place where Abel, his older brother, had knapped out a burin. It was just a patch of dune where stone flakes were scattered, in a rough triangle that showed where Abel had sat. Joshua had picked over the debris, curious. Later, in the hut, he had found the discarded burin itself. It was a fine piece of work, slender and sharp, and yet fitting easily into Joshua’s small hand. And he remembered the spall outside.

He sat where his brother had sat — one leg outstretched, the other tucked underneath. He reached for bits of the spall, and tried to fit them back onto the finished tool. One after another he found flakes that nestled closely into the hollows and valleys of the tool, and then more flakes which clustered around them.

Soon there were more flakes than he could hold in his hands, so he put down his assemblage carefully, and climbed a little way up the cliff behind the hut. He found a young tree sprouting from a hollow, and bled it of sap. With the sticky stuff cradled in his hands he ran back to his workplace, and began to fix the flakes to the tool with dabs of the sap. The sap clung to his fingers, and soon the whole thing was a sticky mess. But he persisted, ignoring the sun that climbed steadily into the sky.

At last he had used up almost all the large flakes he could find on the ground, and there was nothing left there but a little dust. And he had almost reassembled the cobble from which the burin had been carved.

Shouting with excitement he ran into the hut, cradling his reconstruction. But he had received a baffled response. Abel had picked at the sticky assemblage of flakes, saying, “What, what?”

A cobble was a cobble, until it was turned into a tool, and then the cobble no longer existed. Just as Jacob had been a man until he died, and then there was only a mass of meat and bones, soon to be devoured by the worms. To turn a tool back into a cobble was almost as strange to the people as if Joshua had tried to turn Jacob’s bones back into the man himself.

Eventually Abel crushed the little stone jigsaw. The gummy flakes stuck to his hand, and he brushed them off on the dusty ground, growling irritably.

But in some corner of his spacious cranium Joshua had never forgotten how he had solved the puzzle of the shattered cobble. Now, as he pondered the puzzle of the multiple earths and the falling seed, Joshua found that long-ago jigsaw cobble pricking his memory.

And when a second seed fell from the sky — another fat black and white bundle suspended under a blue canopy, landing where the first had lodged at the top of the cliffs — he knew that he could not rest until he had seen for himself what mighty tree might sprout from those strange seeds.

Joshua approached Abel and Saul and other men to accompany him on his jaunt up the cliff face. But there was no purpose to his mission — no game to be hunted, no useful rock, no foraging save for the huge enigmatic seeds which had slid silently over the surface of everybody else’s mind.

And besides, everybody knew there was danger at the top of the cliff. The camp of the Zealots was there, in the centre of a great clearing hacked crudely out of the forest. The Zealots were Skinny-folk. They were easily bested if you could ever get one engaged in close quarters. But the Zealots were cunning, and their heads were full of madness: they could baffle the most powerful of the Hams. They were best avoided.

Joshua tried to go alone. He set foot on the rough goat trail that led by gully and switchback turn up to that cliff-crest forest.

The trail was easy enough, but he soon turned back. The isolation worked on him, soon making him feel as if he didn’t exist at all. The People of the Grey Earth needed nothing in life so much as each other.

But word of his project permeated the gossip-ridden hut. A few days later, to his surprise, he was approached by the young girl Mary, who asked him about the cliff, and the forest, and the strange sky seed.

And a day after that, to his greater surprise, she accompanied him on the trail.

She gossiped all the way to the top of the cliff. “…Ruth say Abel skinny as an En’lish. An” Ruth tell tha” to Miriam. An” Miriam tell Caleb, an” Caleb tell Abel. An” Abel throw rocks and skins all over th” hut. So Abel couple Miriam, and he tell Caleb about tha’, and he tell Ruth. And Ruth say…”

Unlike himself she was no loner. She was immersed in her little society. By comparison it was as if he couldn’t even see or hear the vibrant, engaged people she described.

All of which made it still stranger that she should choose to accompany him on this purposeless jaunt. But Mary was at a key moment in her life, and a certain wanderlust was in her blood right now. Soon she would have to leave the security of the hearths her mother built, and share her life with the men, and with the children who would follow. To cross from one side of a skin hut to the other was an immense journey for someone like Mary. And as nervous courage empowered her for that great adventure, she seemed ready, for the time being, to take on much more outlandish quests.

She was not in oestrus, to Joshua’s great relief. As he made his careful way up the cliff face he was pleased not to have the distraction of his own singing blood.

They reached the top of the cliff. Here they found a shrub laden with bright yellow fruit, and they sat side by side at the cliff’s edge, plucking the fruit, their broad feet dangling in the air. They gazed out in silence towards the east, and the sea.

The sun was still rising, and its light glimmered from the sea’s steel-grey, wrinkled hide. The distinct curve of the world was reflected in layers of scattered purple clouds which hovered over the sea. Joshua could see the grassy plain where he lived, sweeping towards the ocean, terminating in dune fields and pale sand. Near the squat brown shape of the hut itself, people moved to and fro, tiny and clear. He followed streams, shining lines of silver that led towards the sea.

A small group of antelopes picked their way through the morning grass. One of them looked up, as if staring directly at him.

Joshua felt himself dissolve, out from the centre of his head, to the periphery of the world. There was no barrier around him, no layer of interpretation or analogy or nostalgia; for now he was the plain and the sea and the clouds, and he was the slim doe that looked up at the cliff, just as he was the stocky, quiet man who gazed down from it. For a time he was immersed in the world’s beauty in a way no human could have shared.

Then, by unspoken consent, Joshua and Mary folded their legs under them and stood. Side by side, they walked into the forest that crowded close to the cliff.

The green dark was a strong contrast to the bright sea vista. It was not a comfortable place to be.

Washed by the salty air off the sea, the forest was chill, thick with a clammy moisture that settled into Joshua’s bones. And as they penetrated deeper the ground was covered in a tangled mass of roots, branches, leaves and moss, so that in some places Joshua couldn’t see the actual surface at all. He slipped, stumbled and crashed over the undergrowth, making a huge amount of noise.

Mary started to shiver and complain, growing increasingly fearful. But Joshua pulled his skin wraps tighter around him and shoved his way deeper into the forest.

A shadow slid through the wood, just a little way ahead, utterly silent.

Joshua and Mary both froze. Joshua bunched his fists. Was it a Zealot?

The shadow slowed to a halt, and Joshua made out a squat, stocky body, with short legs and immensely long arms, the whole covered by a dark brown layer of hair. A hand reached out and grabbed a bamboo tree. The tree was pulled down until it cracked, and drawn towards a gaping mouth.

It was a Nutcracker-man. Joshua relaxed.

Mary stumbled closer to Joshua, making a cracking noise.

The Nutcracker-man turned his great head with its sculpted skull ridge and giant cheekbones. Perhaps he saw them; if he did he showed no concern. He pulled his bamboo towards his mouth and bit sideways at the trunk, seeking the pithy interior. As he chewed, the heavy muscles that worked his jaw expanded and contracted, making his entire head move.

Though slow and foolish and easily trapped, the Nutcrackers” muscles made them formidable opponents. But the Nutcrackers rarely ventured from their forests, and when they did they showed no instinct for aggression against the Hams. Likewise the Hams did not eat people. The two kinds of people had little in common and nothing to fight about, and simply avoided each other.

After a short time the Nutcracker-man finished his bamboo. He slid effortlessly away into the green, placing his hands and feet slowly and methodically, but he moved rapidly and almost noiselessly, soon outstripping any effort Joshua might have made to catch him.

Out of curiosity Joshua and Mary tried the bamboo. It took both of them to crack a trunk as thick as the one the Nutcracker had pulled over with one hand, and when he tried to bite into it Joshua’s teeth slid off the trunk’s glossy casing.

They moved deeper into the forest. The sun, showing in glittering fragments through the dense canopy, was now high. But Joshua caught occasional glimpses of the sea, and he kept it to his right, so that he knew he was working roughly the way the floating black and white seed had fallen. Mary kept close behind him. Her biceps showed, hard and massive, beneath the tight skins wrapped around her arms.

And now there was another shadow passing through the forest ahead. But this time there was much more noise. Maybe it was a bear, careless of who or what heard it. They both crouched down in a dense patch of tangled branches, and peered out fearfully.

The shadow was small, even slender.

It was just a man, and a feeble-looking man at that, with nothing like the bulk of a Ham, still less a Nutcracker. He was a Skinny: surely a Zealot. He wore skins wrapped closely around his limbs and torso, and he carried a length of bamboo tube. His face was covered by an ugly mass of black beard, and he was muttering to himself as he blundered noisily through the forest.

With some care he selected a broad-trunked tree. He sat down beneath it. He reached into his trousers to scratch his testicles, and emitted a long, luxurious fart. Then he raised the bamboo to his lips. To Joshua’s astonishment, a foamy liquid gushed from the bamboo into the man’s mouth. “Up your arse, Praisegod Michael.” He raised the flask, and drank again. Soon he began to wail. “There is a lady, sweet and kind…”

Mary clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The Zealot was squealing like a sickly child.

Joshua was fascinated by the bamboo flask, by the way the murky liquid poured out into the man’s mouth and down his bearded chin.

The Zealot finished off the contents of his flask. He settled further back against his tree trunk, tucking his arms into his sleeves. He had a broad-rimmed hat on his head, and as he reclined it tipped down over his eyes, hiding his face. His mouth popped open, and soon rattling snores issued from it.

Joshua and Mary crept forward until they stood over the sleeping Zealot. Joshua bent to pick up the bamboo. He tipped it upside down. A little foamy fluid dripped onto his palm. He licked it curiously. The taste was sour, but seemed to fill his head with sharpness.

He inspected the bamboo more closely. Its end had been stopped by a plug of wood, and a loop of leather attached another plug that, with some experimentation, Joshua managed to fit into the open end of the tube, sealing it. Joshua’s people carried their water in their hands, or sometimes plaited leaves or hollowed-out fruit. Though they would have been capable of it, it had never occurred to them to make anything like the Zealot’s bamboo flask.

Mary, meanwhile, was crouching over the Zealot. She was studying his clothing. Joshua saw that it had been cut from finely treated skin. The skin had been heavily modified, with whorls and zigzag lines and crosses scratched into it and coloured with some white mineral. The edges of the various pieces of skin had been punctured. Then a length of vegetable twine had been pushed through the puncture holes, to hold the bits of skin together. Mary picked at the seams and hems with her blunt fingers; she had never seen anything like it.

Joshua found the patterns on the skins deeply disturbing. He had seen their like before, on other Zealot artefacts. To Joshua the patterns made by the markings were at the limit of his awareness, neither there nor not there, flickering like ghosts between the rooms of his mind.

Now Mary’s searching fingers found something dangling around the man’s neck on a piece of thread. It was a bit of bone, that was all, but it had been shaped, more finely than Abel’s best tools.

Joshua studied the bone. Suddenly a man surged out of the carving: his face contorted, his hands outstretched, and his chest ripped open to reveal his heart.

Joshua screamed. He grabbed the bit of bone and yanked it so the thread around the Skinny’s neck broke, and he hurled it away into the forest.

The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. “Oh, Heaven help me! By God’s wounds, help me!”

Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.

So Mary sat on the Zealot’s chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. “Stop talkin” sky! Stop!” The bearded Zealot howled. She slapped him across the face. The Zealot’s head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp. Mary backed away. “Dead?”

Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. “No” dead.”

Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, “Kill?”

Joshua grimaced. “Bad meat. Leave for th” bears.”

“Yes,” Mary said doubtfully. “Leave for th” bears.”

They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot’s filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.

After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.

The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.

And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.

He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin — or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.

It was so strange he could barely even make it out.

Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest.

“Ware,” she said. “Zealots.”

Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots” camp.

But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest’s green shadows.

The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.

But that was all the sense he could make of it.

He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to see the thing. He would study some part of it — like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks — but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.

“Back,” Mary hissed to Joshua.

He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.

But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him — yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.

He came to a sudden decision.

He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff’s edge.

“Joshua!” Mary hissed.

“Help push.” And he applied himself again.

She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn’t come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.

With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

“Soon, something will appear in the sky,” Babo said. “A satellite, like those of the outer planets. Earth will have a Moon, for the first time in its history.”

Manekato scratched her head. “How? By some gravitational deflection?”

“No. Like a Mapping, I think. But not a Mapping. The truth is nobody knows, Mane. But the Astrologers can see it is approaching, in the shivers of the starlight.”

“It must be artificial, this moving of a Moon. A contrivance.”

“Yes, of course. It is a deliberate act. But we do not know the agents or their motive.”

Manekato thought through the implications. “There will be tides,” she said. “Earthquakes. Great waves.”

“Yes. And that is the danger posed to our Farm, and some others.”

Suddenly she was filled with hope. “Is that why I am here? Is it possible to avert this Moon — to save the Farm?”

“No,” he said, sadly but firmly.

She pulled away from him. “You talked of my mission. What mission, if the Farm is doomed?”

“You must travel to the Moon,” said Babo.

“Impossible,” she spanned. “No Mapping has ever been attempted over such a distance.”

“Nevertheless you must make it possible,” Babo said. “You must use the resources of the Farm to achieve it.”

“And if I reach the Moon?”

“Then you must find those responsible for sending this rogue here. You must make them remove it, and have them assure you it will not return.” He forced a smile. “We are a species good at negotiation, Mane. The Lineages could not have survived otherwise. You are all but a matriarch, the matriarch of Poka Lineage. You will find a way. Go to the Moon, Mane — take this chance. I will be with you, if you wish. If you succeed, Poka will be granted new land. We have pledges…”

“And if I fail — or refuse?”

He stiffened. “Then our Lineage will die with us. Of course.”

“Of course—”

There was a fizz of purple light, a stink of ozone. A Worker fell from the sky and landed in the centre of the room. Semi-sentient, it raised a sketchy face and peered at them. Recognizing Manekato, it gave her the doleful news it had brought, its voice flat and unengaged.

Orphaned, brother and sister clung to each other as they wept.

Reid Malenfant:

After days of pressure from Malenfant, McCann agreed to lead them in an orderly expedition back to the crash site of the lander. Malenfant felt a vast relief, as if he was being let out of gaol: at last, some progress.

First, McCann inspected them critically. “I’ll have Julia fit you both with buckskin. One must go cannily. You’ll stand out a mile in those sky-blue nursery rompers.”

The buckskin gear turned out to be old and musty — presumably manufactured, with much labour, for deceased inhabitants of this place. And McCann loaned Malenfant and Nemoto calf-length leather boots, to keep out the snakes and the bugs. The boots were ill-fitting, and much worn. The gear was heavy, stiff and hot to wear, and its rough interior scratched Malenfant’s skin. But it was substantial, feeling like a suit of armour, and was obscurely comforting.

McCann wore a suit of sewn skin and a Davy Crocket hat; he had a crossbow on his back, and a belt of flechettes over his shoulder. He looked capable, tough and well-adapted.

Malenfant wrapped up his coverall and other bits of gear in a skin pack that he wore on his back. He insisted Nemoto do the same; he wanted to be sure they didn’t have to return here if they got the chance to get away.

A party of six Hams was gathered in the courtyard. They were all squat, burly men. The Hams wore their peculiar wrappings of skin, tied in place by bits of thong or vegetable rope, not shaped or sewn. They carried weapons, spears and clubs on loops of rope or tucked into their belts, and their broad elliptical heads were shaded by hats of woven grass.

One of them was Thomas, the man who had rescued Malenfant and Nemoto from the wild Runners in the first place.

Malenfant couldn’t figure out why the Hams had gotten the lens to him (or come to that how they knew he would be interested). Maybe they just like the story, Malenfant thought, the guy who flies to another world in search of his wife. Just like the American taxpayer. Or maybe there are aspects of these quasi people none of us will ever understand.

When Malenfant approached to thank him, Thomas shook his hand, an oddly delicate gesture he must have learned from the stranded English, taking care not to crush Malenfant’s bones. But, when Malenfant questioned him away from the others, he would say nothing of where he had found Emma’s lens.

Two Hams opened the gates of the stockade, and the little party formed up. McCann was to ride in a kind of litter — ‘What a Portugoose would call a machila, I’m told.’ The litter, just a platform of wood, was to be borne by two Hams, and McCann had offered the same to Malenfant and Nemoto.

Malenfant had refused.

Nemoto had been sceptical. “You are sentimental, Malenfant. After a few hours you may long for a ride. And besides, the Hams are well capable of bearing our weight. They are treated well—”

“That’s not the point.”

“Survival is the point. What else?”

Anyhow, with the sun still climbing — with McCann’s litter in the van, Malenfant and Nemoto walking in the centre with Hams beside and behind them — the little party set off.

McCann said they would take a roundabout route to the lander. It would take longer, but would avoid the densest forest and so would be less problematic.

They walked through the forest. The air was laden with moisture and without a breath of wind. The sweat was soon dripping from Malenfant’s scalp into his eyes, and his buckskin was clinging to his back as if glued there.

The Hams walked barefoot along a trail that was invisible to Malenfant, with their feet splayed at wide angles, making fast, short steps, almost delicate. Malenfant tried to keep up. But the brown sheets of dead leaves on top of wet mud made him slip, or he would walk into thorny lianas, or trip over the surface roots that splayed out from the boles of the largest trees. As the feet and legs of the Ham in front began to blur, he realized he was going to have to imitate the Ham’s small movements, but he lost further ground as he tried to master the oddly precise mincing motions.

McCann walked alongside Malenfant, musing. “Hear how quiet it is. One does miss birdsong. Africa is full of birds, of course: parrots and plovers, kingfishers and skimmers. How sad a world without the song of birds, Malenfant.”

Here was a canthium tree: a massive straight black trunk, branches spreading high above the palms. “Keep away from it,” McCann said. “The flowers stink like corpses — to attract flies, you see, which carry its pollen. The pre-sapients keep away from it. The trunk is covered in biting ants—” He froze, and held Malenfant’s arm. “Look there. An Elf.” He dropped to all fours and crawled forward, hiding behind a tree.

Malenfant followed suit. The two of them finished lying in cold mud, side by side, peering through a brush of greenery.

A man sat on a bough, a few feet off the ground — a dwarfish, naked, hairy man with a face like a chimp’s, and no forehead to speak of. He had long legs like a human, long arms like an ape. He pulled twigs towards his face and bit off leaves, with thick, active lips. His face was black, his eyes brown, sheltered by a thick brow of bone. He moved slowly, thoughtfully.

A twig cracked.

The Elf stopped eating. He leaned forward, rocked from side to side to see better. He urinated, a stream of acrid piss that splashed to the floor not feet from Malenfant’s face.

Then he turned away and called. “Oo-hah!”

Suddenly there were more of them, more Elves, shadowy figures with glinting eyes and empty hands. They had black faces and palms and soles. If they had crouched like chimpanzees it would have been okay, but they didn’t; they stood eerily upright, as if their bodies had been distorted in some hideous lab. They were wrong, and Malenfant shivered.

“There are ways to trap them,” McCann whispered. “Though their more robust cousins the Nutcrackers provide better meat. You hunt with special spears, twelve feet long. Then you goad the Nutcracker-man, until he charges onto your spear point…”

The first Elf man stood up straight on his bough. He opened his mouth wide, revealing pink gums and impressive canines, and let out a series of short, piercing barks. He slapped the tree trunk and rattled a branch.

The others joined in, whooping with rage. Their hair was suddenly erect, which made them look twice the size, and they stamped and shook branches in a frenzy. It was quite a display, Malenfant thought, a mass of noise and movement.

Then the man in the tree turned, bent over and let out an explosion of faeces that showered over Malenfant and McCann.

Malenfant brushed gloopy shit off his head. “Jesus. What a situation.”

McCann was laughing.

Now McCann’s Hams stood up. They yelled and banged their spears together, or against-logs and tree trunks.

The Elves turned and ran, melting into the green shadows as fast as they had appeared.

Malenfant was relieved when they broke out of the forest, just as McCann had promised, and he found himself walking through a more open country, a kind of parkland of grass and scattered clumps of trees.

Nemoto trudged sourly beside him, her small face hidden by a broad straw hat.

There were herbs in the grass, and when they were crushed by bare Neandertal feet they sent up a rich aroma. The sun was strong on Malenfant’s face, and the blue Earth rode high in the sky. Malenfant felt lifted, exhilarated — even giddy, he thought, anoxic perhaps, and he made sure he kept his breathing deep and even, making the most of the thin air.

McCann noticed Malenfant’s mood. With a touch of the stubby whip he called a sjambok, he directed his Ham bearers to carry him closer to Malenfant. “Quite a day, isn’t it, Malenfant? You know, I believe that with a knight’s move of that mopani tree over here one might take that kopje, with the thicket of wild banana, over there.”

Malenfant forced a laugh. “Remember, I’m a checkers man.”

McCann was clutching a battered Gladstone bag on his lap, from which he extracted water and ointments to dab on his face, neck and wrists. He looked sideways at Malenfant, as if apologetically. “I fear I may have come across as something less than a man to you, on our first meetings.”

“Not at all.”

“It’s just that one is so desperate for company. But you mustn’t think that I am protesting my lot. I draw strength from the teachings of my father — I grew up in a kirk on the Scottish borders — which took a grip on my mind from early days. My father made me a fatalist in creed: man is but a playing-piece in the hands of the Maker. Chess again, eh? And so it was foreordained that I should be brought to this distant shore. But I admit to a great deal of pleasure in my new home on a day like today. Much of it is familiar. In my time here I’ve spotted wildebeest, kudu, impala. There are few birds in flight, but you’ll find flightless, clucking versions of quail, partridge, pheasant…”

“But it isn’t your true home,” Malenfant said gently. “Nor mine. It’s not even from the right universe. Just as it isn’t home for these Hams, is it?”

McCann eyed him sharply. “You’ve been talking to the fragrant Julia — their legend of the Grey Earth, the place in the sky from which they stumbled. Yes?” He laughed. “Well, it might even be true. Perhaps a party of bar-bars did fall through a shining portal, just as you say your wife did. But it was a blooming long time ago, Malenfant.

“Listen. Once upon a time old Crawford got it into his head that there might be something of value in the ground here — gold, diamonds, even hidden treasure of obscure origin, perhaps laid down by some race of supermen. And he went digging — especially in the hearths and caves of the bar-bars. He had to turf out a few of them to do that, for they will cling to their domiciles. He found no treasure. But what he did find was more bar-bars, or anyhow traces of them, their buried bones mixed in with those peculiar knobkerries and assegais they favour in the wild. There was layer upon layer of bone, said old Crawford, in every place he dug.

“Well, the meaning is obvious. These bar-bars have endured a long stretch on this exotic little world: they must surely have been here for hundreds of generations, thousands of years, or more. And in all that time they have clung to their dreams of home.” He considered Malenfant. “You may think I am harsh with the bar-bars, Malenfant, or uncaring. I am not. Inferior they may be. But what memory lies buried in those deep skulls of theirs! — don’t you think?”

The country began to rise. The little party grew strung out. The grass grew thinner, the underlying crimson soil more densely packed.

They reached the crest of a ridge and took a break. The ground was hard-packed here, covered thinly by bracken and little bushes like hazels. The party, drinking water from a pannikin handed around by a Ham, was surrounded by a thin, subsiding cloud of red dust.

Malenfant stepped forward. The ground fell away before him, and he saw that this ridge curved around, making a neat circle. It was a bowl of greenery. A few improbably tall trees sprouted, but much of the basin was covered by grass that was littered with colour, the yellow and white of marigolds and lilies. Pools glistened on the uneven floor, ringed by lush primeval-looking ferns.

It was a crater, a classic impact formation a couple of miles across. Standing here, Malenfant heard distant calls and hoots. They were the cries of hominids, cousins to mankind, patrolling this forested crater. It was a startling, uplifting, utterly alien prospect.

McCann was standing beside him. “Here we stand, men born on different worlds, confronting a third. Do you know your Plutarch, Malenfant? Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds… ‘Do you not think it lamentable that with such a vast multitude of worlds, we have not yet conquered one?’” He pointed with imperious confidence into the bowl of the crater. “There lies our Redoubtable — or at least her corpse. Come, you men.”

Brushing a walking stick before him, he strode off down the flank of the crater. Malenfant and Nemoto, and the Hams with their litter, hurried to follow.

Malenfant came first on a rib of metal, heavily corroded, that arched into the air above him. Its smooth circular shape was a startling contrast to the fractal profusion of the greenery all around. He stepped under the rib, onto twisted and rusted metallic remnants that groaned under his weight. He found he was in a long cylindrical chamber, its walls extensively broken and corroded, open to the sky. When it was intact this tank must have been six or seven yards in diameter.

Thorn bushes pushed through the base of the cylinder, and creepers.curled over its sides; above, a thick canopy turned the light dim, moist and green. The ship had been a long time dead, and the vegetation had grown over and through it, concealing its remains.

McCann walked in alongside him, followed by Nemoto. The Hams lingered on the fringe of the deeper forest, leaning on the litter and sipping water. Thomas kept an eye on McCann, but his gaze slid over the lines of the ship, as if it were a thing of mists and shadows, not really there.

“This was the propellant tank,” McCann said. He pointed with his stick. “You can see the bulkheads to either end, or what’s left of “em.” McCann pushed on through mazes of piping and cables. Malenfant and Nemoto followed more cautiously, taking care of the sharp edges of twisted metal under their feet.

McCann’s figure was stocky and competent, and swathed in his treated animal skins he looked somehow right against the background of the fallen, smashed-open ship; Malenfant wondered how often he visited this relic of home.

They passed through a ripped-open dome into another cylindrical tank. “Here we stored oxidants. Though of course much of the oxidant was drawn from the air.”

“A ramjet,” Malenfant said to Nemoto.

McCann came to a tangle of what looked like crude electrical equipment, valves and relays, so badly corroded it was an inseparable mass. “Control gear,” he said. “For the pumps and valves and so forth.” They passed through a more solid bulkhead, supported by heavy ribs, and arrived in what appeared to have been habitable quarters. There had been several decks, separated by two or three yards — but now tipped over, so the floors and ceilings had become walls. A fireman’s pole ran along the length of this section, passing neatly through holes in the floors, horizontal now.

McCann pointed out highlights with his stick. “Stores.” Malenfant saw the crumpled remnants of bulky machines, perhaps recycling and cleansing devices for air and water, and refrigerated stores for food, but damaged by fire and gutted; they lay in the dark of the rocket’s hull like foetuses in unhatched dinosaur eggs. “Infirmary, galley, sleeping quarters and such.” Little was left here save a bare frame that might have held bunk beds, a heavy table bolted to the tilted over floor and fitted with leather restraints, perhaps intended for surgery, and the nubs of pipes and flues showed where galley equipment had been ripped out or salvaged.

“And the bridge.” At the nub of the ship, this had been lined with polished oak panels, now scuffed, broken and covered by lichen and moss. Brass portholes bore only fragments of the thick glass that had once lined them. There were heavy couch frames bolted to the floor, long since stripped of their soft coverings. Malenfant could make little of what must once have been instrument panels; now they were just rectangular hollows in the fascia, though he glimpsed tangles of wires behind.

McCann saw him looking. “Once we realized the old lady wasn’t serviceable we stripped out what we could. We built a succession of radio transmitters and heliographs. We got replies, of course, as long as the Earth — I mean, my Earth — still hovered in the sky. That, and promises of rescue, which assurances I have no doubt would have been fulfilled. We kept on trying even after Earth had gone, until the last generator seized up. Powered by a bicycling Runner, incidentally.”

“I’m sorry,” Malenfant said. “She must have been a beautiful ship.”

“Oh, she was. Help me.” Leaning on Malenfant’s arm, he clambered stiffly up the hull wall, using gaping porthole sockets as hand and footholds.

Malenfant followed him. Soon the two of them stood side by side on the outer hull of the habitable section, surrounded by gashes and treacherous-looking rents. But McCann was confident in his step.

From here Malenfant could make out the full sweep of the ship’s length, a slim spear that must have been two hundred yards long. Its lovely back was broken; and green tendrils clutched at the ship, as if pulling it into the belly of the Moon that had killed it. But still a solitary fin poked out of the greenery, crumpled but defiant. The fin bore a faded roundel that reminded Malenfant of the logo of the Royal Air Force.

The Ham man, Thomas, walked beside the ship close to McCann, keeping his eyes on the Englishman.

“He is loyal,” said Malenfant. “He looks out for you all the time.”

“He knows I have done my best to improve the lot of his people.”

Even if it didn’t need improving, Malenfant thought. “But he seems to be having trouble looking at the rocket.”

“The bar-bar mind is rigid, Malenfant. Conservative beyond imagining, they are utterly resistant to the new. At the beginning we had a devil of a battle to keep them from destroying our gear — even when tamed, a bar-bar still harbours destructive tendencies.”

Malenfant recalled the fate of his shoulder camera. He said, “That almost seems superstitious.”

“Oh, not that. There is no superstition among the bar-bars: there is no magic in their world, no sense of the numinous. To them the surface of the world is everything; they do not see hidden meanings, nor seek deeper explanations.”

“They have no gods, then.”

“Nor can they even conceive of the possibility.” McCann smiled. “And what a loss that is. I am sure they are well spared propitiations to the savage and bloody gods of the jungle. But they cannot know the Mercy of the one true God. You understand, it is not merely that they do not know Him — they cannot. And without God, there is no order to their lives, no meaning — save what we provide.” He tapped Malenfant on the chest with the worn head of his walking stick. “I know you are uncomfortable with our relationship to these barbarians, Malenfant. I see it in your eyes. I’ve seen it in Africa, when men of conscience go among the Kaffirs there. But can’t you see it is our duty to provide them with a Johannen way of life — even if they can’t comprehend its meaning? — just as the philosophers and theologians have been proposing since the first steel clippers found these bar-bars” cousins running wild in the New World.”

Malenfant studied Thomas’s face, but could see no hint of reaction to McCann’s sermonizing.

McCann began to talk briskly about the horsepower generated by the “Darwin engines” that had once powered the ship. “I know your little tub came gliding in like a bat. We applied a little more brute force. In the last stages of its descent the redoubtable was intended to land upright on Earth or Moon, standing on its rocket exhaust. And it should have taken off in the same manner.”

“Direct ascent,” Malenfant said. It was a mode that had been considered for Apollo’s lunar landings, a whole ship traversing back and forth between Earth and Moon. But aside from the greater expense compared to the final Lunar Module design, landing such a giant ship with rockets would have posed stability problems, like an ICBM landing on its tail.

From McCann’s descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the Redoubtable.

“She was a veteran,” McCann said softly. “She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and—” He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. “I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God.” He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. “And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots.”

“Erasmus Darwin,” Nemoto called.

Malenfant looked down.

Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. “The Darwin drive,” she said. “Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you’re thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr McCann’s world—”

McCann nodded. “The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920… Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation.”

“Something like that.”

Nemoto moved on, working her way through the ship’s gloomy interior.

McCann watched her, then leaned closer to Malenfant. “Always watching, thinking, recording, your little Oriental friend — eh, Malenfant?”

“That’s her way,” Malenfant said cautiously. “And it’s our mission. Part of it, anyhow.”

“And quite the fount of knowledge about obscure British philosophers two centuries dead.” McCann’s eyes narrowed. “I have observed the gadget she carries.”

Malenfant saw no point in lying. “It’s called a softscreen.”

“Its working is no doubt beyond my comprehension, but its purpose is clear enough. It is a repository of knowledge, from which Madam Nemoto sips as she requires. I am a man of this dismal jungle now, Malenfant, but you need not think me a fool.”

“Take it easy, McCann.”

McCann frowned, as if decoding the colloquialism. “Without my shelter you would both surely be ‘taking it easy’ beneath the crimson dust by now. Remember that.” When Malenfant did not answer, McCann clapped him on the shoulder again. “Enough of one beached vessel; let us seek another. Come.” McCann began to clamber down to the ground, into the helpful arms of the Ham who served him.

It took another two hours to reach the clearing dug out by the lander on its way down.

The lander was gone.

This was the place he remembered: the Gagarin avenue cut through | the trees, the scattered bushes and branches — and even bits of blue ! parafoil, grimy, damp, still clinging to the damaged foliage. But the | lander was gone.

McCann stalked over the grass, inspecting ripped-up bushes, scattered trees. “You’re sure this is the place?”

“It can’t be.”

Nemoto approached him. “Malenfant, you are not a man who has trouble remembering where he parked the car.”

Malenfant wanted to believe the lander was sitting someplace else, where it had fallen, as battered and crumpled and precious as when he and Nemoto had so foolishly become parted from it — a key part of the technological ladder that would take him, and Emma, home. But there could be no doubt.

“We’re stranded, Nemoto,” he blurted. “As stranded as these damn English.”

“Perhaps we always were,” she said evenly.

He hitched his pack of tied-up skin, containing all his belongings, all that was left of Earth. “We’re a pretty pathetic expeditionary force.”

She shrugged. “We still have the most important tools: our minds, and our hands, and our knowledge.” She eyed him. “What do you intend to do now?”

“Let’s get out of here. We have to find the lander. There’s nothing more we can achieve with these English. I hate to be a bad guest, but I’m not sure how well McCann will take our leaving.”

“Not well, I fear,” Nemoto said dryly. And she stepped back.

A hand clamped on Malenfant’s arm. It was a Ham, not Thomas.

McCann came walking up, leaning on his stick, his broad face red and grim. “Thank you, Madam Nemoto,” he said. “He has behaved just as you predicted.”

“Malenfant glared at Nemoto, disbelieving. “You betrayed me. You warned him I’d try something.”

“You are very predictable, Malenfant.” She sighed, impatient, her face expressionless. “You should not make the mistake of believing we share the same agenda, Malenfant. This new Moon, this Red Moon, is the greatest mystery in recorded history — a mystery that deepens with every day that passes, everything we learn. Unless we discover the truth behind it, we will have accomplished nothing.”

“And you believe you can achieve that by staying here, with McCann?”

“We need a base, Malenfant. We need resources. We can’t spend our whole lives looking over our shoulders for the next stone axe to fall, or grubbing around in the forest for food. These British have all that.”

“And what of Emma?”

Nemoto said nothing, but McCann said smoothly, “Our scouts and hunters range far and wide, Malenfant. If she is here, we will find her for you.”

If your Ham scouts tell you everything they see, Malenfant thought. He fingered the little lens in his pocket.

“Let’s look at the matter in a sensible light,” McCann said now. “I know you think little of me, Malenfant. But once again I assure you I am not a fool. I desire more than a chess partner; I desire escape from this place — what man wouldn’t? Now you have fallen from the sky into my lap, and only a fool would let you go, for surely your Americans will come looking for you from that blue Earth of yours. And when they do, they will find me.”

“My world isn’t your world,” Malenfant snarled.

“But my world is lost,” McCann said wistfully. “And I know you have an England. Perhaps I will find a place there.” His face hardened, and Malenfant perceived a new toughness. This was, Malenfant remembered, a representative of a breed who had carved out a global empire — and on a much more hostile planet than Earth. “Providence has given me my chance and I must take it. I believe that in keeping you now, in following the promptings of my own infallible heart, I see the workings of Omnipotence. Is this moral arrogance? But without such beliefs man would never have left the trees and the caves, and remained like our pre-sapient and pongid cousins.” He glanced at Nemoto. “As for your companion’s slight treachery — perhaps she is destined to betray you, over and over, on all Anaxarchus’s infinity of worlds. What do you think?” And he brayed laughter.

The little column formed up for the homeward journey. The big Ham called Thomas took his place beside Malenfant. And he winked broadly.

Emma Stoney:

A day after leaving the first troupe, Emma found another group of Hams, women and a few infants foraging for berries and fruit. They had regarded her blankly, but then, seeing she was no threat — and, as not one of them, of no conceivable interest — they had turned away and continued their gathering.

Emma waited patiently until they were done. Then she followed them back to their encampment.

She stayed here a couple of days, and then moved on, seeking another troupe.

And then on again.

Hams were basically the same, wherever she found them. Their tool-making, for instance. Though each group varied its kit a little according to circumstances, like the availability of different types of stone — and perhaps, she speculated, some slight cultural tradition — still, if something was not in their tool making repertoire, which was evidently very ancient and fixed, no Ham was interested.

They didn’t even talk about their tool-making, even while they jabbered endlessly about their intricate social lives. It was as if they were conscious while they were interacting with each other, but not while they were making tools, or even hunting.

After a time Emma began to get used to it. She reasoned that she did many things she wasn’t aware of, like breathing, and keeping her heart pumping. And she could think of times when she had performed quite complex tasks requiring skill, judgement and the focus on a specific goal without knowing about it — such as driving all the way to work with her mind on some stunt of Malenfant’s, only to “wake up” when she found herself in the car lot. Or she thought of her father, able to carve fine furniture from wood in his hobby workshop, but never able to tell her how it was done; all he could do was show her.

With the Hams, that circle of unawareness spread a little further, that was all. Or maybe it was just that you could get used to anything, given time.

Anyhow it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to run experiments in hominid cognition. It was enough that she was able to use her fish and rabbits and other hunting produce as subtle bribes to gain favour — or at least as a hedge against exclusion.

Thus she worked her way through the forest, moving from one Ham group to the next, using them as stepping stones of comparative safety, one way or another travelling steadily east, day after day, seeking Malenfant.

But sometimes she glimpsed faces in the forest, just at the limit of her vision: hominid faces, watchful, like no species she had yet encountered. It seemed she had barely glimpsed the extent of her kin, on this strange world.

Reid Malenfant:

The details of the regime that would govern Malenfant’s life coalesced with startling speed and efficiency — such speed, in fact, that Malenfant wondered who else McCann or the others had had cause to imprison.

Malenfant was free to come and go, within the stockade. But there was always a burly male Ham at his elbow, even sleeping outside his hut during the night.

He took to prowling around the perimeter fence. It was tall, and its ferocious spikes were daubed with a sticky, tar-like substance. For the first time it struck him that the fence was just as effective at keeping him in as keeping out the undesirables of the wilds beyond. And anyhow every time Malenfant tried to approach the fence too closely, he was immobilized by his Ham guard — as simple as that; one of those massive hands would clamp on his shoulder or elbow or even his head, exerting a strength he couldn’t hope to match.

He tested his cage in other ways.

He spoke to Thomas, asking for his help. But Thomas would say nothing, giving no hint that he was prepared to follow up on that reassuring wink in the forest.

One night Malenfant tried climbing out of his hut’s window. But though it was unglazed the window was small and high. By the time he had dropped clumsily to the ground his Ham keeper was standing over him, silhouetted by blue Earthlight, solid and silent as a rock.

He considered making other protests — going on a hunger strike, maybe. But he sensed McCann might simply let him starve; the steel he had glimpsed in the soul of this other-world Brit did not encourage him to seek for weakness or pity. Alternatively McCann might have his Ham servants force-feed Malenfant, not a prospect he relished, since the Hams were muscled a little too heavily to be good nurses.

Anyhow he needed to build his strength for the days to come, and the search for Emma he confidently expected to be progressing sooner rather than later.

So, after a couple of days, Malenfant began to engage with McCann once more: eating with him, even walking around the compound, conversing. It was a peculiar arrangement, in which both of them clearly knew their relative positions of power and yet did not speak of it, as if they were engaged in some formal game.

Malenfant tried to find out as much as he could about this world from McCann. But the British had done little exploring more than a few days” travel away from their stockade. Their main business here had, after all, been ensuring their survival. And McCann’s mind seemed peculiarly closed to Malenfant. The purpose of McCann’s original mission had not been exploration, and still less science, but economic and political gain for his Empire; he was more like a prospector than a surveyor. But sometimes he spoke again of the deeper mission he felt he had taken on: to bring the word of his God, and his Christ-figure John, to the barbarian hominids of the Red Moon.

McCann was a man with a head full of agendas. It seemed to Malenfant he was barely able to see the Red Moon and its exotic inhabitants for what they were just as the Hams had seemed unable to look directly at the wreckage of the Redoubtable.

Maybe every hominid species had such blind spots, mused Malenfant. He wondered what his own were.

For his part McCann pressed Malenfant about rescue.

Malenfant tried to describe the politics and economics of his home world. He knew it was extremely unlikely that the will to mount a further mission could be assembled on Tide-ravaged Earth — even though the NASA support teams knew where the lander had come down, and had received those few minutes of footage to show he and Nemoto had survived, at least for a time.

McCann showed Malenfant the transceiver gear he and his companions had scavenged from the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was a formidable array of antique-type parts, huge glass valves and mica capacitors and big clattering relays. For years the British had nursed it, for instance keeping it continually powered to save the valves from the thermal shock of being switched on and off. But at last too many of the valves had failed, and other parts were corroded and damaged from prolonged exposure to the damp air. Malenfant tinkered with the gear, but he had less idea than McCann how to fix it.

In his own mind Malenfant’s primary mission remained clear: to find Emma, and get the hell off this Moon. If he could help McCann on the way, fine; if Nemoto wanted to come home or stay here, it was up to her. But they were side issues. To Malenfant, only home and Emma mattered.

So they worked through their days. But as time passed it seemed to Malenfant that McCann grew steadily more anxious. Periodically he would peer up into the sky, as if seeking to reassure himself that Earth was still there.

And Malenfant barely saw Nemoto.

One morning, maybe a week into his captivity, he was woken as usual by Julia, with her wooden bowl of hot water and a fresh stone blade for him to shave. Dressed in her blouse and long skirt of sewn skin, with her muscled body moving powerfully, she looked absurd, like a chimpanzee in a child’s dress.

She picked up his covered slop bucket, curtsied at him — “Baas” — and made to leave.

“Help me,” Malenfant blurted.

She stopped by the door. Malenfant could see the shadow of a burly Ham male outside the door.

“Baas?”

“You know I’m being kept here against my will — umm. Boss McCann won’t let me go. You helped me before. You gave me the lens — the clear stone. You know it came from Emma. I want to get out of here and find her, Julia. I don’t want to hurt anybody, not Boss McCann, not anybody. I just want to get to Emma.”

She shrugged, her mountainous shoulders rippling. “Breakfas’,” she said.

Frustrated, he snapped, “Why do you stay here? Any one of you could take on McCann and his cronies. Even their crossbows couldn’t hold you back if you put your mind to it.”

She looked at him reproachfully. “Tired ol” men,” she said, as if that was explanation enough. Then she turned and walked out, the slop pail carried effortlessly in one huge hand.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

The great Mapping, across a distance unprecedented in recorded history, could be regarded as a technological triumph. But to Manekato it had been like the working out of an intricate mathematical theorem, a theorem that proved the identity of certain points of space and time with certain other points. The fact that those other points were placed close to the surface of a world which had not even existed as the proof was developed scarcely added to the complexity of the procedure. And once the proof was established, the journey itself would be a mere corollary, of little interest save as an exercise for the young.

The proof had not been trivial, but it had not been over-demanding. Most adults, with a little effort, could have achieved the same result. Manekato had worked at the Mapping with part of her mind, with the rest consumed by her grief for her mother and her concerns over her own future.

On Mane’s Earth, anybody could develop a space programme in their spare time.

With her brother Babo and the woman who called herself Without-Name, Manekato stood on the crushed bones of her ancestors. The eternal Wind blasted over the rock, unnoticed. Above her hovered a great rippling lens of star-filled sky, as if a hole had been cut in the clouds: thanks to simple Mapping techniques it was as if she was suspended in orbit, far above the clouds of Earth. But the three of them barely glanced up; it was a minor, uninteresting miracle.

This eroded volcanic core, once the heart of the Farm, was bare now. After her mother had died, Manekato had ordered the deletion of the great House. The walls of Adjusted Space had disappeared like a bursting bubble, as if fifty millennia of sturdy existence had been but a dream. Manekato had welcomed the simple geologic clarity of the mountain’s eroded summit: she knew she could never live in the House, and it served no purpose save to preserve memories of unhappiness.

But she had retained the pit containing the ashes of her grandmothers, and to it she had added the last remains of Nekatopo.

Without-Name stalked around the perimeter of the ash pit, her knuckles pressing disrespectfully into the sealed-in dirt, leaving impressions of her hands and feet. A Worker followed this ill-mannered guest, restoring the pit’s smoothness. “Destroy the pit,” Without-Name told Manekato. “Fill it in. Delete it. It serves no purpose.”

“The pit is the memory of my Lineage,” said Manekato evenly.

Without-Name bared her teeth and growled. “This pit is not a memory. It is a hole filled with dust.”

Babo protested, “The practice of adding oneself to the Farm’s ground at the end of one’s life is as old as our species. It derives from the sensible desire to use every resource to enrich the ground for one’s descendants. Today the practice is symbolic, of course, but—”

“Symbolism. Pah! Symbolism is for fools.”

Babo looked shocked.

If Without-Name enjoyed goading Manekato, she positively relished taunting Babo. “Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.”

Babo said defiantly, “I have visited the Rano Lineage and I saw the pit of your ancestors. You are a hypocrite. You say one thing and practise the other.”

She raised herself to her hind feet and towered over him. She wore her body hair plucked clean in great patches over her body, and where hair remained it had been stiffened into great bristling spikes. It was a fashion from the other side of the world that made her seem oddly savage to Manekato. “Not any more,” she hissed. “I salute death. I salute the cleansing it brings. There is only life all that matters is the here and the now — and what can be achieved in the moment.”

Manekato held back her emotions.

This Without-Name’s preferred diminutive actually was — had been — Renemenagota. But she insisted she had abandoned her true name. “My land is to be destroyed,” she had said. “And so is my Lineage. What purpose does a fossilized name serve?” Even the contradiction in her position — for Without-Name was itself a name, of course, so that she was trapped in an oxymoron — seemed only to please her perversely. Manekato knew she must work with this woman, who was a refugee as she was, to study the rogue Moon and its fabricators; that had been the directive of the Astrologers. But Manekato felt that she had been the target of Without-Name’s bitterness and discourtesy from the moment they had been thrown together…

There was a dazzling electric-blue flash, gone in an instant.

A shift in the Wind touched Manekato’s face. She looked into the tunnel of stars.

“If you embrace experience,” she said, “then you must embrace that.”

Without-Name lifted her head awkwardly, and fell forward onto her knuckles.

Babo was already gazing at the sky, open-mouthed. Even the Workers were backing away, small visual sensors protruding from their hides, peering up at the dangerous sky.

Suddenly the Red Moon swam there, complete, huge.

Reid Malenfant:

Nemoto said in a monotone, “We are dealing with multiple universes. That much is clear. We have seen for ourselves multiple Moons. And we have hints of multiple Earths. The Earth of Hugh McCann is clearly quite different from our Earth even if his history is interestingly convergent with ours. And the Hams talk of a Grey Earth, a third place where conditions may be different again…”

In the hut Malenfant had come to think of as the dining hall, Nemoto and Malenfant faced each other at either end of the long table. The table’s wooden surface, polished to darkness by decades of use, was bare. An elderly Ham woman was preparing lunch.

It had taken days before Malenfant had been able to face Nemoto, such was his anger at her betrayal. But she was his only companion from home, and if he was ever going to get out of here he might need her help. As for Nemoto, it was as if the incident of the betrayal had simply been a step in some grand plan, which any rational person would accept as justified.

But she was changing, Malenfant saw: becoming more withdrawn, hollow-eyed dangerously detached from the texture of the world around her, obsessed instead with huge ideas of origins and destinies.

So Malenfant listened coldly, as Nemoto described alternate realities.

“Malenfant, perhaps there are a cluster of alternate universes with identical histories up to the moment of some key event in the evolution of humanity — and differing after that only in the details of that event, and its consequences.” Nemoto waved her hands vaguely, as if trying to indicate three-dimensional space around her. “Imagine the possible universes arrayed around us in a kind of probability space, Malenfant. Do you see that universes differing only in the details of the evolution of mankind must somehow be close to ours in that graph?”

“And you’re saying this is what we’re experiencing — a crossover between possible universes? Well, maybe. But it’s just talk. What I don’t see is how you can hop from one cosmos to the next.”

Nemoto smiled coldly. “I do not know how that is possible, Malenfant. And what is more important is that I do not know why anybody should wish to make it happen.”

“Why… You think all of this is deliberate — somehow artificial?”

“Your Wheel in Africa looked artificial to me, Malenfant. Perhaps the Hams” Old Ones, if they exist, will be able to tell us what they intended.”

“And you’re going to ask them, I suppose.”

“If they exist. If I can find them. What else is there to do? Malenfant, there is something else. I have raised with McCann the question of whether other life forms exist beyond the Earth — his Earth, I mean. His scientists have looked for evidence, as ours have. They have found none. Philosophers there have propounded something similar to our Fermi Paradox to crystallize this observation.”

“Why is this important?”

“I don’t know yet. But it does appear odd that such a profound contradiction is to be found in both universes…”

Light flickered, startlingly blue, beyond the door frame. Malenfant gasped. The colour had tugged at his heart — for it was the colour of the flash from within the Wheel that had consumed Emma.

They hurried outside. There was something in the sky.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

In her first stunned glance Manekato made out a single vast continent, scorched red, and a blue-grey ocean from which the sun cast a single blunt highlight. The disc, almost full, was surrounded by a thin layer of blurred softness. An atmosphere, then. But no lights shone in the darkened, shadowed crescent.

The Wind buffeted Manekato, turbulent, suddenly uneven. Already it begins, she thought.

Small Workers, no larger than insects, hovered around Babo’s head, defying the shifting breeze; she saw their light play over his face, dense with information. “Its gross parameters are as we anticipated,” he said. “A Moon, a world, two thirds of Earth’s diameter, a quarter of its mass. It has an atmosphere—”

“It is not Farmed,” Without-Name hissed. “Your jabber of numbers is meaningless, you fool. Look at it: it is not Farmed. This Moon is primordial.”

Without-Name was right. Even without magnification Manekato could see great expanses where nothing lived: that ugly red scar of a continent, the naked oceans, those crude caps of ice. It was a world of waste, of unawakened resources.

Wild.

“Wild, yes,” growled Without-Name. “Consider the comparison with our Earth. For two million years we have cherished every atom. We have carefully sustained the diversity of species. We have even sacrificed ourselves — billions of years of lost lives — refusing longevity in order to maintain the balance of the world.”

Mane murmured, “An ecology consisting of a single species would not be sustainable.”

Without-Name laughed. “You quote childish slogans. Think, Manekato! Our species has been shaped, even as we have shaped our world. But nothing about that ugly Moon has been managed. We will have no place. We will have to fight to achieve our purposes, perhaps even to survive.”

Mane was troubled by that perception, though she acknowledged it might contain a grain of truth.

“But,” Babo said, an edge in his voice, “the Red Moon cannot be primordial — it must contain mind — for it would not be here otherwise.”

Yes, Mane thought. Yes. And for that she was afraid of this monstrous Moon. It was a deep fear, of a type she had never suffered before, a fear suffused by a sense of powerlessness. She had to search deep into the recesses of her memory, poring through the most ancient roots of the million-year-old language with which all children were born, to find an ancient, obsolete word that suited what she felt: Superstition.

Babo rattled more statistics of the Moon’s composition, describing a ball of silicate rock and a small iron core. But as his courage grew his thinking seemed to clear. “Earth,” he said. “That wandering Moon is made of the same material as Earth’s outer layers. How can that be?”

The three of them began to talk rapidly, their minds developing and sharing hypotheses.

“Given the identity of substances this body cannot have formed elsewhere in the Solar System.”

“Could it have budded off an Earth while the planet was accreting from the primordial cloud of dust and ice?”

“No, for then its proportions should resemble Earth’s global composition, and this body shows a deficiency of iron and other heavy elements. It is more like a piece of the Earth’s mantle, its outer layers, ripped up and wadded together and thrown into the sky.”

“Then an Earth must have formed, differentiated so the iron-rich rocks sank to the core, before the material to assemble this Moon was detached from the outer layers. But how would it happen?”

“A vast volcanic event? But surely that would not be sufficiently violent—”

“A collision. A rogue planetesimal, a giant, or even a planet. Such a collision might cause a splash of ejecta which could accrete into this Moon…”

Within seconds, then, they had unravelled the mystery of the Moon’s origin, a deduction that had taken humans two centuries of geological science.

All around the Earth, other witnesses must be coming to a similar conclusion, and Manekato imagined a growing consensus of understanding whispering in Babo’s ear.

“But,” Manekato said, “if this Red Moon was born from Earth, it was not our Earth.”

“No,” Babo said sombrely. “For our Earth never suffered a catastrophic collision of that magnitude. We would see the results today, for example in the composition of the planet’s core. And if our world had enjoyed the company of such a Moon everything would have been different in its evolution: much of the primordial atmosphere would have been stripped off in the collision, leaving thinner air less rich in carbon dioxide; there would have been many subtle effects on tides and the world’s spin…”

“On such a world,” Manekato said, “one would not need a Mapping to see the stars. And in such a sky a Moon like this would ride. But such is not our world.”

“Not our universe,” said Without-Name bluntly. “Tell me then, Babo: what do your Astrologers have to say of a power which can Map a Moon, not merely from planet to planet, but between universes?”

“They have little to say,” he said evenly. “That is why we must go there… There is something more.” He uttered a soft command to his Workers.

A new Mapping was made, showing them a vision from a large Farm that straddled the equator of the planet.

A giant blue circle, hovering above the ground, was sweeping over the Farm’s cultivated ground, upright and improbably tall. People stood and watched as it passed. Workers backed away before it. Children ran alongside it, laughing, levering themselves forward on their knuckles in their excitement.

And there were people falling out of the circle’s empty disc.

No, not people, Manekato saw: like people, naked hominids, some tall and hairless, some short and squat and covered in fine black hair. They flopped and gasped for breath like stranded fish, and their flimsy bodies were buffeted this way and that by the Wind.

“What does it mean, Babo?”

“One can predict the broad outline of events. But chaos is in the detail…” He waved his hand, banishing the image.

A gust of Wind howled across the bare, eroded plateau, powerful enough to make Manekato stagger.

Babo stepped forward. “It is time.”

Manekato and Without-Name took his hands and each other’s so the three of them were locked together in a ring.

At the last moment Manekato asked, “Must it be so?”

Babo shrugged regretfully. “The predictions are exact, Mane. The focusing effect of the shoreline’s shape here, the gradient of the ocean floor, the precise positioning of the new Moon in the sky: all of these have conspired to doom our Farm, and the Poka line with it.”

Without-Name tipped back her head and laughed, the spikes that covered her body bristling and twisting. “And for all our vaunted power we can do nothing about it. This is a moment that separates past from future. It is a little death. My friends, welcome the cleansing!”

Manekato uttered a soft command.

The three of them rose into the air, through a body’s height. The Mapping had begun.

Mane…

Surprised to hear her name called, Manekato looked down. One of the Workers, a battered old gadget from a long-forgotten crop, was peering up at her with a glinting lens. It was clinging to the ground with long stabilizing suckers, but the Wind battered at it, and its purple-black hide glistened with rain.

Memory stirred. There had been a Worker like this when she had clambered from her mother’s womb, chattering excitedly, full of energy and curiosity. In those first days and weeks that Worker had fed her, instructed her, kept her from harm, and comforted her when she was afraid. She had not seen the old gadget for years, and had thought little of it. Could this be the same Worker? Why should it seek her now, as it was about to be destroyed?

A wall of rain swept over the mountain-top. The three of them were immediately soaked, and Manekato laboured to breathe the harshly gusting air.

When the rain gust passed, the mountain-top had been swept bare; all the Workers were gone, surely destroyed. Manekato felt an odd, distracting pang — regret, perhaps?

But this was no time to dwell on the past; the nameless one was right about that.

The three of them ascended without effort.

She was still clothed in her body, her legs dangling, her hair soaked. But of course this body was a mere symmorph: differing from her original self in form, but representing the same idea. (And in fact, as she had been through hundreds of previous Mappings, that “original” body had itself been nothing but a symmorph, a copy of a copy reworked to suit temporary needs, though one tailored to remain as close to her primary biological form as possible.)

But such a morphology was no longer appropriate. With a soundless word, she discarded the symmorph, and accepted another form.

Now she was smeared around Earth, immersing it in her awareness, as if it were a speck that floated in her eyeball.

The great Farms glittered over the planet: from pole to pole, around the equator, even on the floor and surface of the oceans, and in the clouds. It was as if the planet were encrusted with jewels of light and life and order. There were no barren red deserts, no frozen ice caps here.

But already, as the Red Moon began its subtle gravitational work, the first changes were visible. Huge ocean storms were unravelling the delicate ocean floor and water-borne Farms. A vast line of earthquakes and ugly volcanism was unstitching an eastern continent. And, from an ocean which was sloshing like water in a disturbed bath, a train of immense tsunamis marched towards the land.

Soon the Poka Farm was covered — extinguished, scoured clear, even the bedrock shattered, the bone dust of her ancestors scattered and lost, beyond memory.

The jewel-like lights were failing, all over the world. There was nothing for her here.

She gazed at her destination, the new, wandering Moon.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant’s world was stratified into layers of varying incomprehensibility.

At the base of it all was the stockade, the familiar sturdy fence and the huts of mud and wood: the physical infrastructure of the world, solid, imperturbable.

And then there were the people.

Hugh McCann was standing alone at the centre of the colony’s little street, hands dangling at his sides, gazing up at a corner of the sky. His mouth was open, and his cheeks glistening, as if he was weeping. Nemoto was shielding her eyes, so that she couldn’t so much as glimpse the sky above.

He saw Julia and Thomas, close together near the gate. The Hams didn’t seem disturbed by the fiery sky. They were stripping off their neat, sewn-together garments, revealing bodies that were ungainly slabs of corded muscle. They pulled on much cruder skin wraps, of the kind Malenfant had seen Thomas wear out in the bush, tying them up with thongs. More Hams were coming in through the open gate (the gate is open, Malenfant!), and they picked up the discarded English-type clothing and started to pull it on.

A shift change, he thought, wondering. As if the settlement was a factory maintained by a pool of labour beyond the stockade walls.

And in the sky…

You can’t put off thinking about it any longer, Malenfant.

Start with the basics. There is the white sun, the yellow Earth (yellow?). There are the clouds, stringy cirrus today, littered over the sky’s dome. And beyond the clouds, in the spaces between sun and Earth -

What, Malenfant?

He saw bars, circles, lines, patterns that seemed to congeal and then disappear. If he stared fixedly at one point of the sky he would make out a fragment of texture, as if something was sliding by, something huge, beyond the roof of the world. But it never stayed stable in his vision — like an optical illusion, a form that oscillated between two interpretations, a bubble that flipped into a crater. And no matter how he tried he would find his eyes sliding away to the familiar, to the huts, the red dust of the ground.

“Why can’t I see it?”

Nemoto kept her head down. “It’s too far beyond your experience, Malenfant. Or above it. You think of your eyes as little cameras, your ears as microphones, giving you some objective impression of the true world. They are not. Everything you think you see is a kind of virtual-reality projection, based on sensory input, framed by prejudice about what the brain imagines ought to be out there. Remember, we evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. Malenfant, you just aren’t programmed to see—”

“The scaffolding in the sky.”

“Whatever it is.”

“Like the Hams. When we went to the wreck of the Redoubtable. It was as if they couldn’t see it at all.”

“Do you find the thought disturbing, Malenfant? To find you have the same limitations as Neandertals?”

“What’s happening, Nemoto? What is coming down on us?”

“I could not begin even to guess.”

McCann was standing alone, still weeping.

As Malenfant approached, McCann used his sleeve to wipe away the dampness on his cheeks, the dribble of mucus that had dangled from his nose. “Malenfant. You bear yourself well. The first Change I witnessed threw me into a cold grue of terror. But you have a stiff back; I could see that about you from the start.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can’t you see?” And he stabbed a finger at the sky, at the Earth.

The new Earth.

The planet was a ball of yellow-white cloud, very bright. It was banded by water-colour streaks of varying colours. There were dark knots in the bands, perhaps giant storms. It reminded Malenfant of nothing so much as spaceprobe images of Jupiter or Saturn. It was a Banded Earth.

Deep unease settled into his gut. “What happened to the Earth?”

“Nothing, Malenfant,” Nemoto said, her voice expressionless. “It’s gone. Or rather, we have. The Red Moon has moved on a fresh universe, another of the vast ensemble of possibilities—”

“And it has taken us with it,” McCann said bitterly. “We have suffered another knight’s move between possibilities. Now do you see why I weep? It is unmanly, perhaps — but now that the Red Moon has moved on from your world, any chance of rescue by your people is gone with it.” He laughed, an ugly sound. “I have seen a whole succession of worlds skip through that dismal sky, Malenfant, each of them as bleak as the last — save only for yours, where I could see the glint of cities on the night side. And then your squat glider came floating down from the sky, and I allowed myself to hope, you see — a fool’s mistake. But now hope is gone, and you are as stranded as I am — both of you — all of us in this Purgatory…”

Malenfant saw it in that instant; it was as if the world swivelled around him, taking on new, and unwelcome, configurations. The Red Moon had moved on. He was indeed stranded, beyond the reach of any help from those who knew him — stranded in another universe, to which he had somehow been transported.

In a corner of his mind he wondered if poor impoverished Luna had been restored to the skies of Earth.

As the light show faded the Hams — the “new shift” — were moving slowly around the stockade, picking up brooms and tools, heading for the huts. Beginning their work.

Malenfant said, “Why do they come here?”

McCann held up his hands, plucked at his threadbare jacket. “Look at me. I am old and fat and tired — and at that I am perhaps the best functioning of those who survived the crash of the Redoubtable. And now look at the bar-bars.” He faced Malenfant. “You think I am some slave-keeper. How could I keep these people, if they did not wish to stay? Or — if I keep slaves, where are the children? Where are the old, the lame?” He pointed beyond the gate. “There is a troupe of them out there. We keep up a certain trade, I suppose you’d call it. They sustain this little township with their labour, as you have seen. And in return, there are things we have which they covet: certain foodstuffs — and beer, Malenfant, your bar-bar gentleman likes his beer!”

Nemoto said levelly to Julia, “Why do you keep these English alive?”

Julia grinned, showing a row of tombstone teeth. “Tired ol” men,” she said.

McCann eyed Malenfant ruefully. “Pity, you see; the pity of animals. They saw we had no women or children, that we were slowly dying. They regard us as pets, these Hams. That is what we are reduced to.”

“And all your talk of educating them in a Christian, umm, Johannen life—”

“A man does not welcome too much reality…”

That gate was still open. You’re wasting time, Malenfant.

He found Julia. She was dressed in her native skins; no trace of her guise as a maid for the English remained. He pointed towards the open gate. He said, “Emma.”

She nodded.

He went back to the others. “I’m out of here, McCann. Will you try to stop me?”

McCann laughed. “What difference does it make now? But what will you do?”

“What I came to do,” Malenfant said bluntly.

“Ah — Emma. I wish I had the comfort of such a goal.” McCann looked at Nemoto. “And you, Madam Nemoto? Will you stay with a beaten old man?”

Nemoto raised her face to the sky; flickering light reflected from her skin. “I will seek answers.”

“Answers?” McCann snorted. “Of what use are answers? Can you eat answers, sleep under them, use them to ward off the Runners, the Elves?”

She shrugged. “I am not content to subsist, like you, like these Hams.”

Malenfant felt reluctant to lose her, even though she had betrayed him. And besides, she was scarcely street-wise: he imagined her dreaming of sheaves of parallel universes as a shaped cobble stove in her skull… “Come with me.”

She appraised him coolly. “We have always had different agendas, Malenfant.”

McCann looked from one to the other. Impulsively he said, “I have been sedentary too long. Let me accompany you, Malenfant. I dare say I have a few tricks, born of long experience, which might yet save your hide.”

Malenfant glanced at Julia, who had no reaction. “What about Crawford and the others?”

McCann clapped Thomas on his broad shoulder. “I see no reason why our friends should fail to look after three as well as they have looked after four.”

Thomas nodded curtly.

Malenfant faced Nemoto. “I hope you find what you are looking for.”

“I will see you again,” she said.

“No,” he said, flooded by a sudden certainty. “No, you won’t. We’ll never meet again.”

She stared at him. Then she turned away.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

She was standing on a shining, smooth surface of Adjusted Space, bright yellow, softly warm under her bare feet. Babo and Without-Name still clung to her hands; she released them.

On the Red Moon, there was no Wind. She relished the luxury of not having to fight against the air’s power, enjoying the ease with which she took each breath.

Around them were a dozen more people — more exiles from one ruined Farm or another, their symmorphs adorned with a startling variety of colours and stylings of skin and hair — and perhaps a hundred times as many Workers: Workers tall and slim, short and squat, Workers that flew and crawled and rolled and walked. As was customary, the people’s new symmorphs were as close as possible in appearance to the shells they had abandoned on Earth.

The Mapping had taken account of the different physical conditions. Thus Manekato felt no discomfort as her lungs drank in the thin, oxygen-depleted air of this small world, and her new body would suffer no ill-effects from the relative lack of carbon dioxide. But she had taken care not to engineer out all of the Red Moon’s experiential differences; for if she had there would scarcely be a purpose in coming here at all. Thus the air was cold and damp and laden with a thousand powerful, unfamiliar scents — and thus the lower gravity, just two-thirds of Earth’s, tugged only feebly at her limbs.

Manekato loped through the crowd of gazing people and scuttling Workers. Her gait felt oddly clumsy in the low gravity, as if her muscles were suddenly over powered. The yellow floor was perhaps a hundred paces across. It was a neatly circular disc of Adjusted Space, its smoothness comforting. She reached the rim of the disc. Tiny Workers streamed past her into the green world beyond, recording, interpreting, transmitting.

Beyond the platform was a wall of forest, concealing a dense green gloom. The trees were tall here: great spindly structures of wood, very different from the ground-hugging species of Wind-blasted Earth. Shadows flitted through that green dark. She thought she saw eyes peering out at her, eyes like a mirror of her own.

Babo ran past her with a gurgled cry. He ran straight into the forest and clambered into the lowest branches of a tree, clumsily, but with enthusiasm and strength.

Manekato peered down. In the Moon’s red dust grass grew, sprinkled with small flowers, white and yellow. She leaned forward, supporting her weight on one fist, and touched the grass. The blades were coarse, and other plants and moss crowded around, fighting over each scrap of soil. She saw leaves protruding from beneath the disc, crushed, bent back; some of the living things of this world had already died because of her presence.

The land here had never been Farmed: not once, not in all the billions of years this world had existed. Even this patch of grass-covered land, where billions of living things fought for life in every scrap, was disturbing, enthralling proof of that.

In front of the forest fringe she made out a small, brown-furred Worker — no, not a Worker, an animal, its species probably unmodified by conscious design. It had a short, slim body, and four spindly legs; it bent a graceful neck, and a small mouth nibbled at the grass. It moved gracefully, but with a startling slowness, an unhurried languor that contrasted with the frantic scuttling of the people and the Workers. By the look of the genitalia between its back legs its kind must reproduce in a mammalian fashion, rather than be nurtured directly from the ground…

Nobody had nurtured this creature, she reminded herself; there had been no conscious process. It had been born in blood and pain and mucus, without the supervision of any human, and it found food to sustain its growth in this wild, unmanaged, undisciplined place.

On her world, there had been no parks or zoos for nine hundred millennia. Though the richness of the ecology was well understood and managed minutely — including the place of people within that ecology — there were no creatures save those that served a conscious purpose, no aspect of nature that was not thought through and controlled. Not so much as a stomach bacterium.

Manekato had known that this new Moon would be wild, but that its ecology would function none the less. But it was one thing to have a theoretical anticipation and another to be confronted with the fact. She felt as if she had entered the workings of some vast intricate machine, all the more remarkable for lacking a conscious designer or a controlling intelligence.

Now Babo came hurrying back from the forest. He clutched something in his arms that wriggled sluggishly.

Babo’s legs were covered in scrapings of green moss, and his hair was dishevelled and dirty. But his eyes were bright, and he was breathing hard. “My arms are strong,” he told his sister. “I can climb. It is as if this body of mine remembers its deepest past, many millions of years lost, even though the trees on Earth are mere wind-blown stubs compared to these mighty pillars…”

Without-Name asked, “What is it you carry?”

He held it out carefully. It had a slim body and a small head. Its legs were short and somewhat bowed, but Manekato could see immediately that this creature was designed — no, had evolved — to walk bipedally. It was perhaps half of Babo’s height, and much slimmer.

“It is a hominid,” she said wonderingly.

“I found it in the tree,” Babo said. “It is quite strong, but moves slowly. It was easy to catch.”

Manekato reached to touch the creature’s face.

The hominid whipped its head sideways and sank its teeth into Manekato’s finger.

Manekato fell back with a small cry. Miniature Workers in her bloodstream caused the ripped flesh to close immediately.

“Ha!” the creature yelled. “Elf strong Elf good hurt stupid Ham hah!”

This jabber meant nothing to Manekato.

Without-Name took the creature from an unresisting Babo. She held it up by its head. Dangling, the hominid hooted and thrashed, scratching at Manekato’s arm with its legs and fists, but its motions; were slow and feeble.

With a single, harsh motion Without-Name crushed the hominid’s skull. The body shuddered once, and was limp. Without-Name let the body fall to the ground, its head a bloody pulp. A Worker scuttled close and swept up the tiny corpse.

Babo looked at Without-Name, his face empty of expression.

“Why did you do that?”

“There was no mind,” said Without-Name. “There was no utility. Therefore there was no right to life. I have been dispossessed by this Moon. I will not rest until I have made the Moon my possession in turn.”

Manekato suppressed her anger. “We did not come here to kill. We came to learn to learn and negotiate.”

Without-Name spat a gobbet of thick phlegm out onto the grass. “We all have our reasons to be here, Manekatopokanemahedo. You follow the foolish dreams of the Astrologers. I am a Farmer.”

“And,” Manekato said slowly, “is that your ambition here? To subdue a new world, to turn it all into your dominion?”

“What higher ambition could there be?”

“But we have yet to find those who moved this world. They were more powerful than these blades of grass, that wretched hominid. Remember that, Renemenagota, when you boast of what you will conquer.”

Now Manekato saw that two burly Workers had brought another hominid for their inspection. It was taller, heavier than the last, but it was scrawny, filthy, hollow-eyed.

Again Without-Name picked up the specimen by its skull and lifted it easily off the ground. The creature cried and struggled, clearly in distress, but its movements were still more sluggish than the first’s, and it made no attempt to injure Without-Name.

“Let it go,” Manekato said evenly.

Without-Name studied her. “You are not of my Lineage. You do not have authority over me.”

“Look at it, Renemenagota. It is wearing clothes.”

Babo breathed deeply. “Do it,” he said. “Or I will have the Workers stop you. I have the authority for that, nameless one, thanks to the Astrologers you despise.”

Without-Name growled her protest. But she released the hominid, which fell into a heap on the floor, and stalked away.

Manekato and Babo huddled over the hominid. It had curled into a foetal position; as gently as they could they turned it on its back and prised open its limbs.

“I think it is female,” Babo said. “Its head is badly bruised, as is its neck, and it struggles to breathe. Without-Name has damaged it.”

“Perhaps the Workers can repair it.”

The hominid coughed and struggled to sit up. Babo helped it with a lift from a powerful hand.

“My name,” the hominid said, “is Nemoto.”

Shadow:

The antelope had got separated from its herd. It was running awkwardly, perhaps hampered by age or injury.

With fluid grace, the lion leapt onto the antelope’s back, forcing it to the ground in a cloud of crimson dust. The antelope kicked and struggled, its back and haunches already horribly ripped. Then the lion inflicted a final, almost graceful bite to its throat. As its blood poured onto the dust of the savannah, Shadow saw surprise in the antelope’s eyes.

More lions came loping up to feed.

Shadow remained huddled behind her rock — exposed on the open savannah, but downwind of the kill. She kept her baby quiet by cradling its big, deformed head tightly against her stomach.

The lions pushed their faces into the fallen antelope’s carcass, digging into the entrails and the easily accessible meat of the fleshy areas. Soon their muzzles were crimson with blood, and their growls of contentment were loud. Shadow was overwhelmed by the iron stink of blood, and the sharp burning scent of the lion’s fur — and by hunger; her mouth pooled with saliva.

Her face itched, and she scratched it.

At last the lions” purring growls receded.

Already more scavengers were approaching the carcass. Hyenas loped hungrily towards it in a jostling pack, and overhead the first bats were wheeling, huge carrion-eating bats, their wings black stripes against the sky.

And, from the crater’s wooded rim, people emerged: Elf-folk like Shadow, men, women and infants, melting out of the green shelter of the woods, their black pelts stark against the green and crimson of the plain. They eyed the carcass hungrily, and they carried sticks and cobbles.

But the hyenas were hungry too, and in a moment they were on the antelope, burying their muzzles inside the great rips made by the lions” jaws, already fighting amongst-themselves. Their lithe bodies clustered over the carcass, tails high in the air, from a distance like maggots working a wound.

The people moved in, yelling and waving their sticks and throwing their stones. Some of the dogs were hit by hurled cobbles. One man, a squat, manic creature with one eye closed by a huge scar, got close enough to pound one animal with a fat branch, causing the dog to yelp and stumble. But the dogs did not back away. A few of them tore themselves away from the meat long enough to rush at the hominids, barking and snapping, before hurling themselves back into the feast. Most simply ignored the people, gouging out as much meat as they could before being forced away by a dog bigger and stronger.

So it went, a web of complex but unconscious calculations: each hyena’s dilemma over whether to attack the hominids, or whether to gamble that another dog would, leaving it free to take more meat; the hominids” estimation of the strength and determination of the hyenas versus their own hunger and the value of the meat.

This time, at least, the hyenas were too strong.

The Elf-folk troupe backed away sullenly. They found a place in the shade of the trees at the forest edge, staring with undisguised envy at the rich meat being devoured by the dogs.

At last the hyenas started to disperse. They had taken most of the meat, and the antelope was reduced to scattered bones and bits of flesh on a blood-stained patch of ground, as if it had exploded. Again the people came forward, and their stones and sticks drove away the last of the dogs.

There was little meat to be had. But there was still a rich resource here, which hominid tools could reach. The adults took the antelope’s bones and, with brisk, skilful strikes of their shaped stones, they cracked them open. Soon many of the people were sucking marrow greedily. Children fought over scraps of flesh and cartilage.

Huge bats flapped down, their leathery wings black, vulture-like. They pecked at outlying bits of the carcass, bloodying their fur. The people tolerated them. But if the bats came too close they would be greeted by a stick wielded by a hooting hominid.

Shadow came out from behind her rock.

A child came up to her, curious, a bit of gristle dangling from her chin. But as Shadow neared, the child wrinkled her nose and stared hard at Shadow’s face. Then she turned and ran for the security of her mother.

As Shadow approached the group, the people moved their children away from her, or growled, or even threw stones. But they did not try to drive her away.

Shadow saw a big older woman, the hair of her back oddly streaked with silver. This woman — Silverneck — was working assiduously at the remnant of a thigh bone. Shadow sat close to Silverneck, not asking for food, content not to be rejected.

The sun wheeled across the sky, and the people worked at the carcass.

At length Silverneck hurled away the last fragments of bone. She lay on her back, legs crossed, and crooked an arm behind her head. She belched, picked bits of marrow and bone from her teeth, and thrust a finger into one nostril with every sign of contentment.

Cautiously, her baby clinging to her back, Shadow crept closer. She started to groom Silverneck, picking gently through the hairs of Silverneck’s shoulders. The older woman, reclining stiffly, submitted to this in silence, eyes closed as if asleep.

Shadow knew what she must do to win a place here. In her home forest she had watched women seeking favour with their seniors. Still cautious, Shadow moved towards Silverneck’s waist and reached out to stroke the older woman’s genitals, just as she had seen others do before.

A hand grasped her wrist, gentle but strong. Silverneck’s face, worn almost bald by grooming, was a mass of wrinkles. And it showed disgust. She pulled her legs under her, and pushed Shadow away.

Shadow sat still, baffled, disturbed.

After a time Shadow again reached out to groom Silverneck. Again Silverneck submitted. This time Shadow did not try to cross the boundary to sexual contact, and Silverneck did not push her away.

As the shadows lengthened across the plain, the carrion-eating bats clustered closer around the remnants of the carcass. One by one the people started to drift back to the forest. The first roosting calls began to sound from the tree tops.

At last the old woman stretched and yawned loudly, bones popping. Then she got to her feet and ambled back towards the forest’s edge.

Shadow sat where she was, waiting.

Silverneck looked back once, thoughtfully. Then she turned and moved on.

Shadow got to her feet, her baby clinging to her back. Hastily she rummaged through the carcass, but the marrow and meat had been chewed or sucked off every bone. Cramming bits of greasy skin into her mouth, she hurried after Silverneck into the forest.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

With a wave of his hand Babo conjured an image of the Red Moon — but it was not an image, rather a limited injective-recursive Mapping of the Moon into itself. The Moon turned for their benefit, a great hovering globe twice Babo’s height. Manekato gazed at searing red desert-continent and steel ocean.

The little hominid who called herself Nemoto stood close to Manekato, her eyes wide, her smooth face bearing some unreadable expression.

“Your work is proceeding well,” Manekato said to her brother.

“It is a routine application of familiar techniques; merely a question of gathering sufficient data… But already the key to this world’s mysteries is clear.”

“Ah.” Manekato said sombrely. She reached up and pointed at the huge volcano that dominated the western side of the rust-red continent. “You mean that.”

“Yes, the volcanic anomaly,” Babo said. “Which in turn must derive from some magmatic feature, a plume arising deep within the belly of this world.”

“You talk of the Bullseye?” Nemoto was watching them, straining to hear, turning her little head this way and that in order to position her small immobile ears.

Babo watched Nemoto uneasily. “Do you think she can follow us?”

“I have taught her a few words,” said Manekato. “But our speech is too rapid for her to grasp; like all the creatures here on this oxygen-starved world, she is sluggish and slow-witted. I have had more success in decoding her own language. It is a little like the nonsense argots you used to make up for my amusement as a child, Babo.”

Babo was still watching Nemoto. “She imitates your behaviour well. Look how she gazes at the volcano! It’s almost as if she can understand what she is seeing.”

Manekato grunted. “Do not underestimate her, brother. I believe she is intelligent, to a degree. Consider the clothes she wears, her speech with its limited grammar, the tools she deploys — even her writing of symbols into her blocks of bound paper. Why, she claims to have come here, not through the blue portals, but in a spacecraft designed by others of her kind. And that she came to this Moon from curiosity. I found this as hard to believe as you, but she drew sketches which convinced me she is telling the truth.”

“But even the making of clothes may be no more than the outcome of instinct, Mane,” Babo said gently. “There is a kind of aquatic spider that makes diving bells from its webbing, and nobody would argue that it is intelligent. Perhaps some day we will discover a species, utterly without mind, which makes starships. Why not? And nor is symbol-making sufficient to demonstrate intelligence; there are social ants which—”

Manekato raised a hand to quiet him. “I am aware of the dangers of anthropomorphism. You think I have found a pet, here in this dismal place — that I am seeking intelligence where all I see is a reflection of my own self.”

Babo rubbed her back affectionately. “Well, isn’t that true?”

“Perhaps. But I strive to discount it. And meanwhile I have come to the belief that Nemoto and her kind may be — not merely intelligent — but self-aware.”

Babo laughed. “Come now, Mane. Let us show her a mirror, and together we will watch her seek the hominid behind the glass.”

“I already tried that test,” Manekato said. “She was very insulted.”

“If she is too proud to be tested, why does she follow you around?”

“For protection,” Manekato said promptly. “You saw how Without-Name treated her when she first found her. Nemoto shows great fear of her.”

Babo grunted. He crouched down before the hominid, Nemoto; his huge body was like a wall before her slim frame.

Nemoto returned his gaze calmly.

“…Intelligent, Mane? But the size of the cranium, the limited expanse of the frontal lobes — the dullness of those eyes. I do not get a sense of a person looking back out at me.”

Manekato snapped, “And you can assess a creature’s intelligence merely by looking at it?” She said, “Nemoto.”

The hominid looked up at her.

“You remember what I told you of the Mapping.” Manekato strove to slow down her speech, and to pronounce each word of Nemoto’s limited language clearly and distinctly.

Nemoto was frowning, concentrating hard. “I remember. You defined a mathematical function to map the components of your body to material of the Moon.” Her words, like her actions, were slow, drawn-out. “The domain of this function was yourselves and your equipment, the range a subset of the Moon. When you had defined the Mapping…”

“Yes?”

Nemoto struggled, but failed-to find the words. “/ have much to learn.’1

Babo grunted. “It is impressive that she knows there are limits to her knowledge. Perhaps that indicates some degree of self-awareness after all.”

Manekato said, “Then I am winning the argument.”

Babo grumbled good-naturedly. “Just remember we are here to study the Moon, and those who sent it spinning between the universes — not to converse with these brutish hominids, who were certainly not responsible.”

Manekato studied Nemoto. The little creature was watching her with empty, serious eyes. “Come,” said Manekato, and she held out her hand.

Nemoto took it with some reluctance.

Babo turned back to the refinement of his Mapping.

Manekato led Nemoto across the Mapped-in floor of the compound. They passed between structures that had been conjured out of Adjusted Space to shelter the people. Rounded yellow forms, to Mane’s taste over-ornate, they made the compound look like a plate set before a giant, loaded with exotic shapes — and with insect-like humans, Workers and hominids scuttling across it.

“You must not let my brother upset you,” Manekato said evenly, striving to express herself correctly in the narrow confines of Nemoto’s limited tongue.

“He has no imagination,” said Nemoto.

Manekato barked laughter, and Nemoto flinched. “I’ll tell him you said that!… But he means you no harm.”

“Unlike Without-Name, who does mean harm, and who has far too much imagination.”

“That is insightful, and neatly phrased.” She snapped her fingers and a Worker came scuttling. “Well done, Nemoto. You deserve a banana.”

Nemoto regarded the yellow fruit proffered by the Worker with loathing.

Manekato shrugged. She popped the banana into her mouth and swallowed it whole, skin and all.

Nemoto said cautiously, “I think your world has no Moon — none but this unwanted arrival.”

Manekato, interested, said, “And what of it?”

“Our scientists have speculated how the destiny of my world might have differed if it had been born without a Moon.”

“Really?” Manekato wondered briefly if “scientists” was correctly translated.

Nemoto took a deep breath. “Our Moon was born in a giant impact, in the final stage of the violent formation of the Solar System. The effects on Earth were profound…”

Manekato was fascinated by all this — not so much by the content, which seemed trivially obvious, but by the fact that Nemoto was able to spin together such a coherent statement at all — even if it was delivered in a maddeningly slow drawl. But Nemoto seemed desperate to retain Manekato’s attention, to win her understanding — and perhaps her approval.

“And what difference would all this make to the evolution of life?”

Nemoto said, “You come from a world that spins fast. There must be winds there persistent, strong. Perhaps you were once bipeds, but now you walk on all fours; probably I could not stand upright on your world. Your trees must hug the ground. And so on. Your air, derived from a primordial atmosphere never stripped off by impact, is thicker than mine, richer in carbon dioxide, probably richer in oxygen. You think fast, move fast, fuelled by the oxygen-rich air.” She hesitated. “And perhaps you die fast. Mane, I can expect to live for seventy years — years measured on your Earth, or mine. And you?”

“Twenty-five,” Manekato breathed. “Or less.” She was stunned by Nemoto’s sudden acuity — but then the homimd had been observing her for days now, learning about Manekato as Manekato had learned about her; she had simply saved up her conclusions — as a good scientist should.

“The evolution of life must have been quite different,” Nemoto said now. “With lower tides your oceans must be less enriched of silt washed down from the continents. And there must be less global ocean movement. I would expect a significantly different biota.

“As for humans, I believe that our evolutionary paths diverged at the stage we call the ‘Australopithecine’, Manekato. But the environment was different on our worlds, evoking a different adaptation. I would hazard that hunting is not a viable strategy for homimds on your world. Probably your short days were simply not long enough. You call yourself ‘Farmers’. Perhaps your world encouraged the early development of agriculture.”

“ ‘Australopithecines.’ I don’t know that word.”

“The homimds called Nutcrackers and Elves here seem to be surviving specimens. From that root stock your kind took one path; mine took another.”

“But, Nemoto — why do such divergent worlds have people at all? Why would homimd forms evolve on world after world—”

“Your kind did not originate on your Earth,” Nemoto said bluntly. “Your scientists must have deduced that much.”

Manekato bristled. She tried to put aside her annoyance at being patronized by this monkey-thing. “You are right. That much is evident. People share the same biochemical substrate as other living things, but are linked to no animal alive or of the past by any clear evolutionary path.”

“But on my Earth there is a clear evolutionary path to be traced from humans back into the past.”

“So you are saying my line originated on your Earth? And how did my Australopithecine grandmothers get delivered to ‘my Earth’?”

Nemoto shrugged. “Perhaps by this Red Moon, and its blue-ring scoops.”

It was a startling vision — especially coming from the mouth of this small brained biped — but it had a certain cogency. Manekato was aware her mouth was dangling open; she shut it with a snap of her great teeth. “Who would have devised such a mechanism? And why?”

Nemoto’s face pulled tight in the grimace Manekato had come to recognize as a smile. “The Hams have a legend of the Old Ones, who built the world. I am hoping you will find them.”

Manekato glared at Nemoto: she was profoundly impressed by Nemoto’s acuity, yet she was embarrassed at her own condescension towards the hominid. It was not a comfortable mixture. “We will talk of this further.”

“We must,” said Nemoto.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant counted them. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen Runners: eighteen powerful, languid bodies relaxing on the barren ground. The band seemed to be settling here for the night. The three of them — Julia, Malenfant, Hugh McCann — hunkered down in the dirt. The grass beneath Malenfant’s scuffed boots was sparse, and the Mars-red dust of the world showed through, crimson-bright where it caught the light of the setting sun.

This swathe of scrubby grassland was at the western border of the coastal forest strip NASA cartographers had christened the Beltway. Further west of this point, beyond a range of eroded mountains, there was only the arid, baked interior of the great continent, hundreds of miles of red desert, an Australia in the sky. No doubt it was stocked with its own unique ecology exquisitely evolved to maximize the use of the available resources, Malenfant thought sourly, but it was an unremittingly hostile place for a middle-aged American — and of no interest to him whatsoever, unless it held Emma in its barren heart.

McCann moved closer to Malenfant, his buckskin clothes creaking softly. “How strange these pongids are,” he said. “How very obviously ante-human. See the way they have made their crude camp. They have built a fire, you see, probably from a hot coal carried for tens of miles by some horny-handed wretch. They even have a rudimentary sense of the hearth and home: look at that big buck voiding his bowels, off beyond the group — what an immense straining — everything these fellows do is mighty!

“But that is about the extent of their humanity. They have no tools, save the pebbles they pluck from the ground to be shaped; they carry nothing for sentiment — nothing at all, so their nakedness is deeper than ever yours or mine could be. And though they gather in little clusters, of mothers with infants, a few younger siblings, there is no community there.

“If you look into the eyes of a Runner, Malenfant, you see a bright primal presence, you see cleverness — but you do not see a mind. There is only the now, and that is all there will ever be. Whatever dim spark of awareness resides behind those deceptive eyes is trapped forever in a cage of inarticulacy… One must pity them, even as one admires them for their animal grace.”

Malenfant grimaced. “Another lecture, Hugh?”

McCann sighed. “I have been effectively alone here too long, my reflections on the strange lost creatures who inhabit this place rattling around in my head. Would I were as conservative with my words as dear Julia, who, like the rest of her kind, speaks only when necessary!”

Or maybe, Malenfant thought, she just hasn’t got much to say to you, or me. He’d observed the Hams chattering among themselves, when they thought no human was watching them. For all his bush craft, McCann’s understanding of the creatures around him was obviously shallow.

Without a word, Julia stood up and began to walk across the sparse scrub towards the Running-folk. McCann and Malenfant stayed crouched in the dirt.

The Runners turned to watch her approach. They were silent, still, like wary prey animals.

Julia got as far as the Runners” fire. She hunkered down there, making sure she didn’t sit close to the meat. The Runners were still wary — one burly man bared his teeth at Julia, which she calmly ignored — but they didn’t try to drive her away.

After a time an infant came up to her, bright eyes over a lithe little body. Julia reached out her massive hand, but its mother instantly snatched the child back.

Malenfant suppressed a sigh. Sometimes Julia would win the Runners” confidence quickly; other times it took longer. Tonight it looked as if Julia would have to spend the night in the Runners” rough camp before they could make any further progress.

As the days had worn on, Malenfant had lost count of the number of Runner groups they had tracked down. Julia was always given the lead, hoping to establish a basis of trust, and then Malenfant and McCann would follow up. Malenfant would produce his precious South African air force lens, his one indubitable trace of Emma, hoping for some spark of recognition in those bright animal eyes.

It hadn’t worked so far, and Malenfant, despite his own grim determination, was gradually losing hope. But he didn’t have any better ideas.

As Julia sat quietly with the Runners, the light leaked out of the sky. The predators began to call, their eerie howls carrying far on the still evening air.

Briskly, without speaking, Malenfant and McCann built a fire. They used dry grass for tinder, and had brought bundles of wood from the Beltway for fuel.

Malenfant’s supper was a few mouthfuls of raw fish. The Runners used their fires primarily for warmth, not cooking. If McCann or Malenfant were to throw this tough, salty fish onto the fire, the smell of burned flesh would spook the Runners and quickly drive them away.

After that it was foot-maintenance time. Malenfant eased off his boots and inspected the latest damage. There was a kind of flea that laid eggs under your toenail, and naturally it was Malenfant who was infected. When the critters started to grow in the soft flesh under there, feeding off his damn toe cheese, McCann said Julia would dig them out with her stone knives. Malenfant backed off from that, sterilized his pocket knife in the fire, and did it himself. But, Christ, it hurt, unreasonably so, and it made a bloody mess of his toes; for the next few days he had had a lot of trouble walking.

When he was done with his feet, Malenfant started making pem-mican. It was one of his long-term projects. You took congealed fat from cooked fish, and softened it in your hands. Then you used one of Julia’s stone knives to grate the cooked flesh into powdery pieces and mixed it with the fat. You added some salt and berries and maybe a little grated nutmeg from McCann’s pack, and then pulled the mess apart into lumps the size of a golf ball. You rolled the balls into cocktail-sausage shapes, and put them in the sun, to set hard.

He had already done the same with a haunch of antelope. It was simple stuff, dredged up from his memories of his astronaut survival training. But the treatment ought to make these bits of fish and meat last months.

McCann sat and watched him. He was nursing a wooden bowl filled with a tea made of crushed green needles from a spruce tree. Malenfant had been sceptical of what he saw as an English affectation, but the tea was oddly refreshing; Malenfant suspected the needles were full of Vitamin C. But the tea was strongly flavoured and full of sharp bits of needle (which he had learned to strain out through a sock).

McCann said, “Malenfant, you are a man of silence and unswerving intent. Your preparations are admirable and thorough. But to enter the desert is foolhardy, no matter how many pemmican cakes you make. Even if you could find your way through the mountains, there is only aridity beyond.”

Malenfant growled, “We have this conversation roughly once a day, Hugh. We must have found all the Runner groups who work this area, and have come up blank. On the other hand, we know a lot of them work deeper into the desert.” He squinted, peering into the harsh flat light of the arid western lands. “There could be dozens more tribes out there. We have to go find them.”

McCann pulled a face and sipped his tea. “And seek out traces of your Emma.”

Malenfant kept kneading his pemmican. “You’ve come this far, and I’m grateful. But if you don’t want to follow me any further that’s okay by me.”

McCann smiled, tired. “I suppose I have attached myself to you — become a squire to your chessboard knight. On this desolate Red Moon we are all lost, you see, Malenfant — not just your Emma. And we all seek purpose.”

Malenfant grunted, uncomfortable. “I’m grateful for your company. But why the hell you’re doing it is your business, not mine. I never cared much for psychoanalysis.”

McCann frowned at the term, but seemed to puzzle out its meaning. “You always look outward, don’t you? — but perhaps it would serve you to look inward, from time to time.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“For a man with such a powerful drive — a drive to a goal for which he is clearly prepared to give his life — you seem little interested in the origin of that drive.” McCann raised a finger. “I predict you will puzzle it out in the end — though it may require you to find Emma herself before you do so.”

They would take turns to stand watch: McCann first, then Malenfant.

Malenfant cleaned his teeth with a bit of twig. Then he settled down for his first sleep.

The nights here were always cold. Malenfant zipped up his jumpsuit, placed a bag of underwear under his hips to soften the hardness of the ground, and pulled a couple of layers of “chute cloth over his body. He set his head on the pack in which he carried the remnant of his NASA coverall, his real-world underwear and the rest of his few luxuries, and he put spare underwear under his hip for a mattress. Though he had gotten used to his suit of deerskin — it had softened with use, and after the first few days he suspected it stank more of him than its original owner — he clung to the few items he had salvaged from the ludicrous wreck of his mission as a kind of message to himself, a reminder that he hadn’t been born in these circumstances, and maybe he wouldn’t have to die in them either.

As usual he had trouble settling.

“I don’t like to complain,” he said at length.

“Of course not.”

“This ground is like rock. I can’t turn over without dislocating a hip.”

“Then don’t turn over.”

So it went.

After three hours it was Malenfant’s turn to stand watch. McCann shook Malenfant awake, pitching him into a cold, star-littered night. Malenfant shook out his blanket and went to take a leak. Sign of age, Malenfant.

Beyond the circle of light from their hearth, the desert was deep and dark, its emptiness broken only by the ragged glow of the Runners” fire.

Sometimes it scared him to think of what a wilderness it was that had claimed him. There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him — no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.

And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain — but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, was a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives. And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it.

All save one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

The final time he woke that night, he found Julia looming over him. She was a vast silhouette whose disturbing scent of other was enough to kick Malenfant’s hind brain into wakefulness. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. His “chute-silk blanket fell away, and all his warmth was lost to the cool, moist air. It was a little after dawn, and the world was drenched with a blue-grey light that turned the crimson sand purple.

The Runners had gone. He could just make them out, slim dark figures against the purple-grey desert, running easily and silently, far away into the desert.

He hadn’t even gotten to show them his lens.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

There was a call from Babo, who was standing beneath his beautiful spinning globe. Manekato hurried to her brother, and Nemoto jogged after her.

The great rotating Moon-projection had been rendered semi-transparent. And there was a hole in its very heart.

Something lurked there, blocky, enclosed — clearly artificial, very large. It was connected to the surface by a long, thread-like tube: not entirely straight, bending like a reed as it passed through the Moon’s layers of core, thick mantle and deep, hard lithosphere, so much thicker on this small cold world than the crustal layers of the Earth. The tube terminated in what looked like a small, compact crater, not far from the eastern shore of the world-spanning continent not far from the location of the compound, in fact.

Manekato reached inside the Map. The misty layers of mantle and core resisted her gently, as if her fingers were pushing through some viscous liquid. She wrapped her fingers around the knot of machinery at the Map’s centre. It was dense and complex and well-anchored.

Nemoto watched her carefully.

“It is the world engine,” said Babo.

Studying the globe as a whole, Manekato saw that the surface crater was diametrically opposite the summit of the great volcanic mountain, at the peak of the huge region of uplift that so distorted the figure of the world. Looking more closely she could see detail in the Map’s misty outer layers: a disturbance in the core, a great plume in the deep-buried mantle, hot magmatic material working its way up through cracks in the mighty lithosphere towards that antipodal bulge.

“I cannot believe that such asymmetry is deliberate,” Babo said.

“No,” Manekato said. “The internal disturbances must be a result of the poor control of the Moon as it lurches from universe to universe. Perhaps the Moon is not meant to plummet about the cosmic manifold like this. The mechanism is poorly designed…”

“Or faulty. If it has been sweeping up hominids since early in our evolution, Mane, it must have been operating for millions of years.”

“Perhaps even the great machines of the Old Ones are subject to failure.”

“Quantum tunnelling,” said Babo. “That’s how they do it. That’s how this thing in the core sends this Moon from universe to universe.”

Manekato said, “Tell me what you mean, brother.”

“You understand the concept. An electron, say, does not have a precise position or velocity; rather it is embedded in a spreading cloud of probability. Given a measurement of its position, there is a small but finite chance that the electron will next be found — not close to the last position — but far away, outside any cage you care to throw around it — or at the heart of the sun — or in orbit around a distant star…”

“Yes, yes. Or even another universe. Is that your point?”

He scratched his head absently. “Well, we know that quantum tunnelling can cause the nucleation of a new universe. The vacuum sustains a series of energy levels. A bubble of ‘our’ vacuum can tunnel to an otherwise empty spacetime at a lower energy state, and there expand and become causally disconnected from our own…”

“We are talking of moving not an electron, but a world.”

Babo shrugged. “I think we have the pieces of the puzzle now, at least; perhaps understanding will follow.”

“In any case, our next object is clear,” Manekato said. She pressed a finger into the crater at the top of the tube from the core; she could barely feel the feather-touch of its tiny rim. “We must go to this strange crater, learn all we can — and, perhaps, seek a way to direct the future course of this rogue Moon.”

“The manifold is a sheaf of possible universes,” Nemoto said.

Babo grimaced. “What did she say?”

Nemoto went on, “I understand some of what you say. Perhaps the manifold universes were nucleated from a single primal universe by some such mechanism as quantum tunnelling. Perhaps the nucleation of the universes was deliberate. Perhaps the Old Ones lived in the primal universe…”

Babo bared his teeth at her, and Nemoto fell silent.

Manekato said dryly, “What’s wrong?”

“She sees so much,” Babo said. “Much further than I imagined. If she sees so much, will she not see that the achievements of the Old Ones are as far beyond us as…”

“As our Farms and our Maps are beyond her poor grasp?” She touched his shoulder, mock-grooming, seeking to calm him. “But would that be so bad? Would it hurt us to learn some of her humility?”

“I don’t think she is so humble, Mane. Look at the defiance in that small face. It is unnatural. It is like being challenged by a Worker.”

A cry rent the air.

Nemoto turned sharply. Manekato felt her ears swivel. It had been a cry of pain and despair — an animal’s cry, but desolating none the less.

Nemoto began to run towards the place the cry had come from.

After a moment’s hesitation, Manekato hurried after her pet.

“Oh, let me up; I beg you. Madam Daemon, by the blood of Christ, let me up!”

It was Without-Name, of course. She had caught another hominid. She had him sprawled on the smooth floor of the compound with her massive foot in the small of the back, so that he could do little but flop like a fish. He was wearing clothes of a cruder design than Nemoto’s — scraps of skin sewn together with bits of hide, as if he had clambered inside the gruesome reconstruction of a dead animal. It seemed his capture had not been without incident. Blood leaked from a filthy wound on his forehead, and his right foot was dangling at an awkward angle, just a mass of blood, badly pulped. His blood and snot and sweat, even his urine, had spilled over the floor of Adjusted Spacetime.

Others stood around the gruesome little tableau. Manekato was dismayed to see fascination on several faces, as if the blood-soaked allure of this world was seeping into more than one soul.

She rested a hand on Nemoto’s shoulder. “He is a member of your troupe? That is why you are distressed.”

“No. I have never seen him before. And we don’t have ‘troupes’. But he is human, and he is suffering.”

Babo challenged Without-Name. “What new savagery is this, Renemenagota of Rano?”

“Am I the savage? Then what is this under my foot? We are not at home now, Manekato — we are not even on Earth. And if we wish to progress our inquiries we must abandon the techniques we would apply on the Earth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You gaze at a pretty Map while the real world is all around you — vibrant, primal.” She slapped at the floor of Adjusted Space. “You even separate yourselves from the dirt. Have you stepped off this platform, Manekato, even once? I tell you, this is not a place for logic and Maps. It is a place of red and green, of life and blood and death — a place for the heart, not the head.”

“And your heart tells you to torment this helpless wretch,” Babo said.

“But not without a purpose,” Without-Name said. “He comes from a troupe of hominids to the north of here. They live in crude shelters of wood and mud, and they call themselves Zealots. They are as intelligent as your pet, Manekato but they are utterly insane, driven by dreams of a God they cannot see.” She bellowed laughter, and applied more pressure with her heel to the Zealot’s back; he groaned, his eyes rolling, as bones cracked. “These Zealots have been here for centuries. With their feeble eyes, their dim brains, they have seen this world which you are too frightened to touch. They have seen the workings of the Old Ones, for they have been dragged from one cosmos to the next by their meddling. And they have formulated their own ambition in response: to spit in the face of the sky itself.” She looked down at the sprawled, twitching hominid. “It is absurd. But in its way, it is magnificent. Hah! These are the creatures of this world. I want to see what they see, know what they know. That way I will learn the truth about the Old Ones — and what must be done to defeat them.”

Others growled assent behind her.

Manekato, deeply disturbed, stepped closer to Without-Name. “We did not come here to inflict pain.”

“There is no pain here,” Without-Name said easily. “For there is no sentience. You see only reflex, as a leaf follows the sunlight.”

“No.” It was Nemoto. She stepped forward, evading the clutching hand of Manekato.

The nameless one gaped at her, briefly too startled to react.

“I know that you understand me. I believe your species has superior cognition to my own. But nevertheless we have cognition. This man is aware of himself, of his pain. And he is terrified, for he is aware that you plan to kill him, Renemenagota.”

Without-Name reared up on her hind legs, and the man in the dust howled. “You will not use my name.”

“Let him go.” Nemoto held out her arms, her hands empty.

The moment stretched. Without-Name towered over the slim form of the hominid.

Then Without-Name stepped off the fallen man and pushed him away with her foot. She dropped to her knuckles and laughed. “Your pet has an amusing defiance, Manekato. Nevertheless I tell you that these creatures of the Moon are the key to our strategy here. The key!” And she knuckle-walked away towards the forest, where she blended into the shadows of the trees.

Where she had shoved him, the fallen Zealot had left a trail of urine and blood. Workers hurried forward to tend him, and to clean the mess he had made.

Manekato approached the trembling hominid. “Nemoto — I am sorry—”

Nemoto shrugged off her touch. “So you understand, at last. Let me reward you with a banana.” And she stalked away, her anger visible in every step, every gesture.

Reid Malenfant:

“About the desert,” McCann said. He took a half-burned twig and started to scrape at the red dust, sketching out a map. “Here is the Congo — I mean, the great river which rises in the foothills of the great volcano you call the Bullseye, the river that winds its way through the interior of the continent to debouche into the ocean beyond the forests. For much of its length the river’s flow is confined to a series of ancient canyons, where the stream is fed by a series of underground tributaries. The north bank is very arid. But on its south bank — here, for example — there are flood plains where the vegetation grows a little more thickly.

“Here is what I propose. We will cut across the plain, meeting the river valley at this point, where there is a crossing place to the south bank, which is the greener. We will follow the river, heading steadily west, following it upstream as it works its way through the mountains, and using the vegetation and its inhabitants as our base resource. Thus we will seek out these shy Runner bands of yours. And if we fail to find your Emma before the character of the country changes — well, we will think of something else.”

Malenfant felt tempted to argue with this strategy. But he had no better ideas of how to explore a continent-wide desert, in search of a single person. And there might be a logic to it: whatever she was doing, whoever she was with, Emma surely couldn’t be anywhere else but close to water.

The river, then. He nodded curtly. McCann grinned and scuffed over his map with the sole of his boot.

They heard a cry.

It was Julia. She was hunting a lame deer. She had stripped naked and was running flat out towards it; baffled by a rock outcropping, the animal turned the wrong way, and Julia fell on the animal’s neck and wrestled it to the ground.

“Dinner is served,” McCann said dryly.

“There must be an easier way to make a living,” Malenfant said.

McCann shrugged. “You don’t find much to admire about these non-human humans, do you, Malenfant? Don’t you envy Julia her brutal strength, her immersion in the bloody moment, her uncomplicated heart?”

“No,” Malenfant said quietly.

They entered the desert.

Malenfant sacrificed more parafoil silk to make a hat and a scarf for his neck, and he added a little of a silvered survival blanket to the top of his hat to deflect the sunlight. After the first couple of days his eyes hurt badly in the powerful light. In his pack was a small chemical-film camera; he broke this open with a rock, and tied the fogged film over his eyes with a length of “chute cord.

McCann fared a little better. His ancient suit of skin, well-worn and much-used, had a hood he could pull over his head, and various ingenious flaps he could open to make the suit more or less porous.

Julia’s squat bow-legged frame was made for short bursts of extreme energy, not for the steady slog of a desert hike. She struggled as her feet sank into the soft, stingingly hot sand. But she kept on, grinning, self-deprecating, her tongue lolling from her open mouth, her sparse hair plastered to the top of her head.

Anyhow it wasn’t a desert, Malenfant supposed; not strictly. Life flourished, after a fashion. In the red dust shrubs and cacti battled for space with the ubiquitous stands of spiky spinifex grass. Lizards of species he couldn’t identify scuttled after insects. He spotted a kind of mouse hopping by like a tiny kangaroo. He had no idea how such a creature could survive here; maybe it had some way of manufacturing its own water from the plants it chewed on.

Not a desert, then. Probably a climatologist would call it a temperate semi desert. But it was dry as toast, and hot enough for Malenfant.

It was a relief to them all when they reached the river.

Malenfant and Julia pulled off their clothes and ran with howls of relief into the sluggish water. McCann was a little more decorous, but he stripped down to his trousers and paddled cautiously. Malenfant splashed silty-brown liquid into his face, and watched improbably large droplets hover around him; he felt as if his skin were sucking in the water directly through his pores.

Great islands floated past, natural rafts of reed and water-hyacinth, emissaries from the continent’s far interior, a startling procession of vegetation on its way to the sea. It was a reminder that this single mighty stream drained an area the size of India.

The river flowed sluggishly between yellow sandstone cliffs streaked with white and black. Here and there he saw sandbars strewn with black or brown boulders mudstones and shales, said McCann, laid down in ancient swamps. The sedimentary strata here were all but horizontal, undisturbed: these were rocks that had remained stable for a great length of time, for a thousand million years and more. This Moon was a small, static world.

Life flourished close to the river. The bank was crowded with plants that craved the direct sunlight, bushes and lianas competing for space. Even behind them the first rank of trees was draped with lianas, ferns and orchids, overshadowed only by the occasional climbing palm. Wispy manioc shrubs grew on the lower slopes. Speckled toads croaked all along the river bank, and fireflies the size of earwigs, each of them making a spark of green light, danced and darted in the tangled shadows of the trees.

A vast spider-web stretched between two relatively bare tree trunks. It was heavy with moisture, and glistened silver-white, like strings of pearls. Looking closer, Malenfant saw that many spiders, maybe a hundred or more, inhabited the web. A social species of spider?

Objects hung from the higher branches of the palms, like pendulous fruit, leathery and dark brown, each maybe a foot long.

“They are bats,” McCann murmured. “They have wing spans of a yard or more. Those are males. At night they call for the attention of females.” He rammed his fingers into his nostrils, and cried, “Kwok! Kwok! And the females fly up and down the line for hours, selecting the male who sings the most sweetly…”

After a time Julia clambered out of the water. She took a handful of palm oil from a wooden gourd in McCann’s pack, and worked it into her skin, paying attention to every crease and the spaces between her fingers and toes. When she stood, her skin shone, lustrous. She was silent, beautiful.

McCann went fishing. He found a spot where the bank curved, cupping a still, shallow patch of water, thick with reeds. He took leaves from a pretty little bush with white flowers shaped like bells. He scattered the flowers in the river, over the still spot.

Above the shallower water, by the reed-beds, dragonflies hovered and zigzagged, big scarlet creatures the size of small birds. Sometimes they dipped their abdomens into the river, breaking the sluggish, oily surface of the water. Perhaps they were laying eggs, Malenfant mused, wishing he knew more natural history; when you got down to it he knew very little about his own world, let alone this exotic new one.

To Malenfant’s surprise, fish started coming to the surface in front of McCann, their fins breaking the oily meniscus, their mouths popping. Evidently they couldn’t breathe. McCann, stocky, determined, splashed into the water and started grabbing the fish, holding their tails and slamming their heads against rocks on the bank.

Malenfant thought he saw something move through the water. He scrambled out fast.

It had been bigger than any fish, but not the distinctive shape of a croc or an alligator — something that must have been at least his size, and covered with sleek hair, like a seal. But neither of the others noticed anything, so he didn’t mention it.

They spent a day at the side of the river, and replenished their stock of fish, then moved on, heading steadily west.

By noon the following day they had come to a place which showed signs of habitation. A small beach close to the river was littered with blackened scars, perhaps the marks of hearths, and neat rings of holes showed in the ground. When Malenfant walked here his boots crunched over a litter of stone tools. Julia cowered, her huge arms wrapped around her torso. Malenfant asked, “What is it? A Runners” camp?”

McCann’s face was grim. “Runners are not so permanent as this — and nor do they make such structures. See these holes? They are for the wooden supports of tents and the like… But see the scattering of the fires, the heaps of discarded tools. Men do not conduct themselves so, Malenfant; we would build a single fire; we would take our tools with us. This is a Ham settlement — or was. And, look, the great thickness of the debris tells of a long occupation, which is of course typical of these dogged, infinitely patient Hams. But it was an occupation that was ended bloodily. Here, and here…” Stains on rocks, that might have been dried blood. “They are recent. It is the Zealots, Malenfant. We must be alert for their scouts.”

Julia was clearly distressed here. They moved on quickly.

After that, another day’s hike took them to the spot McCann had picked out as a possible crossing place. On the far side of the river, just as he had promised, the land was flatter and less rocky, and there was more life: a few shrubs, some straggling trees, even patches of green grass.

And, stretched between the banks, tied firmly to a rock on either side, there was a rope.

Malenfant and McCann inspected the rope dubiously. It seemed to be of vegetable fibre, woven tightly together into a thick cord.

McCann picked at the rope. “Look at this. I think this material has been worked by teeth.”

“It isn’t human, is it?”

McCann smiled. “Certainly this is not what our hands would make — but we have never observed the Hams or the Runners use ropes on such a scale, or to have the imaginative intellect to make a bridge — and still less the Elves or Nutcrackers.” He looked around coolly. “Perhaps there are others here, other pre-sapient types we have yet to encounter.”

Malenfant grunted. “Well, whoever they are, I’m glad they came this way.”

Malenfant crossed first. He went naked. He probed at the river bed with a wooden pole as he inched forward, and he dragged another rope, a length of “chute cord, tied around his waist. The water never came higher than his ribs.

Once he was across, he and McCann started to transfer their packs of clothes and food. They used a karabiner clip from Malenfant’s NASA jumpsuit to attach each pack to the ropes, then pulled at the “chute cord to jiggle the packs across.

Julia came next. She entered the water with a dogged determination that overcame her obvious reluctance — which wasn’t surprising, as her stocky frame was too densely packed for her to float; whatever else they were capable of, Neandertals couldn’t swim. McCann fixed a loop of cord around her waist and clipped her to the “chute line with the karabiner clip. Then he and Malenfant kept a tight hold of the “chute line as she crossed — though whether they could have retrieved her great weight from the water if something had gone wrong Malenfant wasn’t sure.

It took no more than an hour for them all to get across. They spread out their gear to dry, and rested. Cleansed by the water, lying on warm rocks, Malenfant found he enjoyed the touch of the sun on his face, the arid breeze that blew off the desert.

Julia grunted, pointing at the river. There were creatures in the water.

They were sleek swimmers, their hair long and slicked down, their bodies streamlined. Their hands and feet were clearly webbed — but those hands had five fingers, and the small-brained heads had recognizable eyes and noses and mouths. They were churning in the water, clambering over each other like mackerel in a net. Oblivious of Malenfant and the others, they seemed to be lunging at the sky, their round eyes shining.

They were hominids.

“Swimmers,” said McCann morosely. “Sometimes they’ll steal fish off your line… The Hams have stories of how a Swimmer will aid you if you get yourself into trouble in the water, but I’ve never observed such a thing. And, do you know, they appear to sleep with only one eye shut at a time; perhaps they need to keep conscious enough to control their breathing…”

Malenfant imagined a troupe of Australopithecines, perhaps, scooped from some quasi-African plain a couple of million years ago, and dumped by the merciless working of the electric-blue portals on an isolated outcrop of rock on some watery Earth. Ninety-nine out of a hundred such colonies would surely have starved quickly — even if they hadn’t drowned first. But a few survived, and learned to use the water, seeking fish and vegetation — and, in time, they left the land behind altogether…

And now here were their descendants, scooped up by another Wheel, stranded once again on the Red Moon.

Hominids like dolphins. How strange, Malenfant thought.

Something immense collided with the back of his head.

He was on the ground. He felt something pushing down on his back. A foot, maybe. One eye was pressed into the ground, but the other was exposed, and could see.

That fat new Earth still swam in the sky.

He heard a commotion. Maybe Julia was putting up a fight. A face — runtish, filthy — eclipsed the Banded Earth.

Once again the back of his head was struck, very hard, and he could think no more.

Shadow:

Shadow learned day by day how to live with these new people, here on the slope of the crater wall.

One morning she brought a bundle of ginger leaves she had collected from the forest. She approached the group of women that was, as usual, centred on Silverneck. She sat next to Silverneck, offering the leaves.

A woman called Hairless — left almost totally bald in her upper body by over grooming — immediately grabbed all the leaves. She passed some to Silverneck and the others. When Shadow tried to get back some of her leaves, Hairless slapped her away.

So Shadow came up behind Hairless and began to groom her. Though Hairless flinched away at first, she submitted.

But now Hairless spotted the baby, clinging to Shadow’s neck. She reached out and plucked the baby off Shadow, as if picking a fruit off a branch. Shadow did not resist. Hairless poked her finger in the baby’s mouth and fingered his genitals. The baby squirmed, his huge head lolling.

While Hairless probed at her baby, Shadow stole back some leaves.

But Hairless developed a sudden disgust for the malformed infant. She thrust the child back at Shadow, jabbering.

Shadow retreated to the fringe of the group, chewing quietly on her prize.

Shadow was the lowest of the women here. She made her nests on the periphery of the group, and she kept as quiet as possible. Though she clung to Silverneck as much as she could, she was subject to abuse, violence, and theft of her food from men and women alike.

But this community was different from that of Termite and Big Boss. Here, sex was everything.

During some rough-and-tumble play between older infants, a chase and wrestle involved a boy taking the penis of another in his mouth. Soon the wrestling had dissolved into a bout of oral sex and other erotic games, after which the chasing began again.

One day two of the more powerful men came into conflict. One of them was Stripe, the dominant man, a tall, robust man with a stripe of grey hair down one side of his head. The other was One-eye, the shorter, more manic man who had taken it on himself to attack the pack of hyenas with a stick on the day Shadow had joined this new group. The fight, caused when One-eye didn’t respond submissively enough to an early-morning show of power by Stripe, escalated from yelling and hair-bristling to a show of shoving and punching. At last one firm kick from Stripe put One-eye on his back.

The smaller man got up, confronting Stripe again. Both men’s fur bristled, as if full of electricity — and both had erections. After another bout of shouting, they grew quieter, and One-eye, hesitantly, reached out and took Stripe’s erection, rubbing it gently. After a time Stripe’s bristling hair subsided, and he briskly cupped One-eye’s scrotum.

The contact was quickly over. Neither man reached an orgasm, but orgasms were usually not the point.

Sex was everything. Couplings between men and women, and the older children, were frequent, both belly-to-back and belly-to-belly. Infants became excited during couplings, jumping over the adults involved and sometimes pressing their own genitals against the adults’. But contact between members of the same sex was common too.

It was a lesson Shadow learned quickly. She learned how to avert a male fist by grasping a penis or scrotum, or taking it in her mouth, or allowing a brief copulation. She earned toleration by groups of women as they fed or groomed by rubbing breasts and genitals, or allowing herself to be touched in turn.

But still, things went badly for her, no matter how hard she worked. She was surrounded by hostility and disgust. The women would push her and her baby away, the men would hit her, and children would stare, wrinkle their noses at her and throw stones or sticks.

There was something wrong, with herself and her baby. The wrongness began to be embedded in her, so that she accepted it as part of her life.

That was why she submitted to the attentions of One-eye without resisting.

Many of the men, at one time or another, initiated sexual contact with Shadow. She was young, and, save for the lingering wrongness, healthy and attractive. But the contacts rarely led to ejaculation; the man, after being lost briefly in pleasure, would look at her, and his face would change, and he would push her away. After a time most of her contacts came from boys, eager to experiment with a mature woman, and men who for some reason were frustrated elsewhere; she learned to submit to their immature or angry fumblings, and the blows that came with them.

But One-eye was different. Of all the men. One-eye alone developed an obsession with Shadow.

At first his approaches to her were conventional. He would come to her with legs splayed and erection showing, sometimes shaking branches and leaves. She would submit, as she had learned to submit to any demand made of her, and he would take her into the shade of a tree.

But from the beginning his coupling was rough, leaving her breasts pinched and bitten, her thighs scratched and bruised.

After a time his demands became cruder. He would drop the formalities of the invitation and simply take her, wherever and whenever he felt like it — even if she was feeding, or suckling her child, or sleeping in her nest. He seemed to find her exciting and would quickly reach orgasm. But the speed of the couplings did not reduce their violence.

The other women rejected One-eye. If he approached them they would turn away, or run to the protection of the powerful women. His intent, manic strength repelled the women. And so he was forced to prey on the very old and young and weak, who were unable to defend themselves — them, and Shadow, for Shadow got no protection from the other women, not even Silverneck.

Bruised and bloodied, she submitted to his attentions, over and again, and the sex became harsher.

One day Shadow caught a glimpse of one reason why she continued to be shunned.

One-eye had used her particularly hard that day, and some old wounds had been opened by his roughness; she wanted to clear the dirt and blood from the injuries before they began to stink. Deep in the forest, high on the wall of the crater, she found a small, still pool. She leaned over the pool, reaching for the water.

A reflection peered back out at her.

She leapt back, jabbering in alarm. Her infant, feebly crawling in the leaves, fell on her belly and mewled.

Cautiously Shadow crept back to the pond. A face peered out at her, a face made grotesque with a bulbous nose and lumpy protrusions on its cheekbones and brow. The face was alarming and threatening — but of course it was her own face.

Screeching, she dug her fingernails into her face, the swellings there, and tried to rip it off, longing to throw it far away from her. But she succeeded only in making her face bleed, and great crimson drops splashed into the little pool that had betrayed her.

By now, Shadow had no memory of the infected stream from which she had drunk when she crossed the plain, and had no understanding of the fungus infection she had contracted.

She lay down in the leaves, thumb jammed in her mouth. Her child began to sneeze, loudly and liquidly.

Shadow uncurled. She rolled over and picked up her infant. She inspected the child’s dribbling nose, then she plucked some leaves and wiped away the snot and dirt. Then she took the softly weeping child to her breast.

Far away she heard a hooting. It was the cry of One-eye, seeking to use her body once more. She curled tighter around her child.

The infant’s cold grew steadily worse, developing into a fever that kept him awake during the night.

Shadow quickly grew exhausted, without energy enough even to feed herself, or keep herself properly clean. The swellings on her face now itched constantly. They hurt badly when struck. And they continued to grow, to the point where she could see the fleshy masses framing her eye sockets and cheekbones.

Even in the midst of all this, she was not spared One-eye’s voracious demands.

She never resisted him. But out of his sight she would place her sickly infant down carefully on a bed of leaves or a nest of branches. If the coupling permitted it, she would look across that way, and even reach out to touch or stroke the child.

Eventually One-eye noticed this.

It enraged him. He was already lying on top of her. He pinched her chin in his right hand, making her face him, and he punched her hard on the lumps in her brow, making her scream. Then he grabbed her ankles and pushed them back towards her head, and entered her savagely.

When he was done he pushed her away and began to beat her, aiming precise blows at her belly and kidneys. When she curled in on herself he grabbed her arms and pulled her open, making her lie unprotected on her back, and rammed his fist over and over into her solar plexus.

The world dissolved into fragments, red as blood, white as bone.

When she came to she could barely move. Her belly and back were a mass of pain, and one eye was covered with a film of drying blood.

Silverneck had taken her baby. The older woman cradled him on her lap, and was even allowing him to suck on her cracked, dry nipples.

With a groan, Shadow let the world fall away again.

After a time, she was aware of a looming shape before her. Her child was sleeping uneasily at her breast. She cringed, trying to curl tighter.

But a gentle hand touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently back. It was Silverneck. She was carrying a pepper. Its stem had been pulled out, and it was full of water. Shadow drank greedily. But her lips were cracked and swollen, and she felt the water dribble down her chin.

It was dark before she found the strength to clamber a little way up into a tree, and construct a rough nest.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant was bent double. His arms were pinned behind his back. Something was jolting him, over and over. His head felt like it would explode. It was like the feeling you got after a few days on orbit, when your body fluid balance hadn’t yet adjusted to microgravity, and blood pooled in your head.

But when he forced his eyes open — the light stabbed bright, making him squint he saw, in glimpsed shards, a ground of rust-red dust, powerful bare legs pumping.

Not on orbit, it appears, Malenfant. He was being carried over somebody’s shoulder, in a fireman’s lift. But his head was upside down, and with every step his cheek crashed into the back of his carrier.

He threw up. It was a spasm of gut and throat; suddenly hot yellow-green fluid was spilling down the naked back before his eyes.

There was a loud hoot of protest. With a shrug he was thrown off the shoulder, as if he were as light as a feather, with a good two yards to fall to the ground.

The fall seemed long, slow-motion. He couldn’t raise his bound arms to protect himself. He landed head-first.

When he came to again his head ached even worse than before. He was lying on his side. All he could see was red dust, and a pair of grimy buckskin boots. His legs were free. But his arms, still pinned behind his back, felt like they were half-wrenched out of their sockets.

A buckskin boot dug into his stomach to tip him over, none too gently. He finished up on his back, as helpless as a landed fish. It felt as if his neck was in his own warm vomit.

Faces loomed over him. One pushed closer. It was a bearded man, aged perhaps forty; his face was round, greasy, suspicious.

Malenfant tried to speak. “Let me up,” he gasped.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “English? But no argot I ever heard. What are you, a Frenchie?” His accent was thick, the vowels twisted, almost incomprehensible.

Somebody said, “He’s sick. Leave him. We ain’t here for this.”

Beyond the bearded man Malenfant saw McCann; he seemed composed, though his arms were bound. “Sprigge. In the bowels of Christ I beseech you. He is an Englishman.”

The bearded man — Sprigge — glared at McCann. Then he turned back to Malenfant. “Get him up.”

Ungentle hands dug into Malenfant’s armpits and hauled him off the dirt. He managed to get his feet on the ground. But he couldn’t keep his eyes targeted; they slid sideways in their sockets as if he were drunk, and when he was let go he fell back into the dirt.

His NASA boots were gone. His feet were bare, grimy and bleeding. They even took my socks, he thought. He wondered what had happened to his pack.

Sprigge stood over Malenfant again. “Get up or I leave you for the Elves.”

Malenfant slumped forward. He managed to get up onto one knee, got one foot on the ground, and pushed himself up. This time he staggered, and his head still spun, but he stayed upright.

McCann said, “You can’t expect the man to walk.”

Sprigge nodded, and snapped a finger.

A huge Runner stepped up to Malenfant. He was naked, dust-encrusted — and his head was small, like a child’s, though his face was weather-beaten and scarred. From the look of the dribble of vomit down his back, this had been Malenfant’s reluctant mount.

The Runner kneeled in front of Malenfant, his hands making a stirrup. Malenfant stared stupidly.

McCann said, “Use him, Malenfant.” Now Malenfant saw that McCann was sitting on the shoulders of another huge Runner, like a child riding on its father. The Runner’s head was bowed, his eyes fixed on the dirt. McCann seemed relaxed, almost comfortable. “Follow my lead, Malenfant. One must keep up the front.”

“…I.”

Julia walked up to Malenfant. Her head was bowed, and her wraps of skin had been ripped away, leaving her naked. But her hands were unbound.

Sprigge touched his belt, where a whip was coiled.

Julia kept her gaze directed at the dirt, not looking the humans in the face. She said, “Carry Mal’fan’.”

Sprigge barked a laugh. “So you use a Ham’s quim, Sir Malenfant. Your punishment will sting if you let Praisegod Michael witness such iniquity.” But he stepped back.

Julia slid her arms under Malenfant’s body and lifted him effortlessly, like a child.

The party formed up and began to move off over the dirt.

The party was made up of perhaps a dozen Runners. Most were naked, though some wore loincloths. Some of them bore heavy packs, or loads on their heads and shoulders. Two of them were dragging the carcass of an immense bull antelope on a crude travois. The rest of the Runners had passengers: buckskin-clothed men sitting on their shoulders, stubby whips in their hands. All the Runners walked silently, just waiting for instruction. Several of them had scars striped on their shoulders and bellies.

There was one other hominid: a Ham, dressed in clothes as comparatively well stitched as those of the humans. He carried a whip; perhaps he was a supervisor, a boss.

Malenfant saw that Julia’s breasts were scratched, as if by fingernails, or teeth. “Did they hurt you?”

She did not answer.

McCann’s Runner came trotting alongside. “She shouldn’t speak to you, Malenfant,” McCann said urgently. “It will be a whipping for her if she does, and perhaps for you. She knows how to behave with these types; you must learn, and fast. These brutes had a little gruesome fun with her, but yon Constable Sprigge stopped them. I sense there is a core of decency in that man, under the dirt and violence. Perhaps that will assist us as we deal with these Zealots…”

“Zealots,” Malenfant growled.

McCann said grimly, “I did not expect to encounter them here. They are clearly expanding their area of operations — which is all the worse for us. Listen to me, Malenfant. Your romantic quest for Emma is going to have to wait. It’s vital to keep up a front. All that keeps us from doing the carrying rather than being carried is that these fellows accept us as human beings. So you must act as if it is your privilege, no, your right, to use the muscles of these poor creatures as if they belonged to you. And don’t forget, you’re English.” He eyed Malenfant. “A colonial type like you might take it as a great indignity to have to impersonate a Britisher. But I believe any of these ruffians would run you through if they suspected you were a French or a Spaniard or a Portugoose…”

Malenfant said bitterly, “You know what? I miss America. In America you can travel more than a couple of miles without getting robbed, attacked, kidnapped or trussed up.”

“Chin up, sir. Chin up.”

Malenfant’s thinking dissolved. Lulled by the stink of the dust, his weakness, and Julia’s steady warmth, he dozed.

Somewhere thunder cracked, and when he looked up he saw more fat clouds scudding across the sky.

Half a day after the capture of Malenfant and the others, the party reached the fringes of the Zealot empire.

They crossed a plain scattered with broken rock fragments. The rim of a broad young crater loomed over the horizon; perhaps they were in the crater’s debris field. In any event it was slow, difficult going, as the Runners had to pick their way past huge sharp-edged boulders.

They came to a place where a thin, sluggish stream ran, and green growing things clustered close to its banks. The land had been cleared. Malenfant saw how the rocks had been piled up into waist-high dry stone walls, mile after mile of them. The rocks must have been broken up before they were moved, a hell of a labour — but then labour was cheap here.

In a field close to the river, a team of Runners was drawing a wooden plough. The four of them were bound together by a thick leather harness, and wooden yokes lay over their shoulders. The Runners were followed by a Ham, a stocky man who carried a long whip.

When Sprigge’s party came alongside, the Ham overseer stared at Julia. Then he turned back to his charges and lashed them, a single stroke that cut across all four backs. The Runners, their faces empty, did not look up from the dirt they tilled.

“Good God,” Malenfant said, disgusted.

“It would pay you not to blaspheme in this company,” McCann said evenly. “And besides, is it any less cruel to use an ox or a horse for such a purpose?”

“Those draught animals aren’t oxen, McCann. They are hominids.”

“Hominids, but not people, Malenfant,” McCann said sadly. “If they have no conception of pain — if even their Ham boss does not — then what harm is done?”

“You can’t believe that’s true.”

McCann said stiffly, “I would sooner believe it than join those poor Runner gentlemen behind their plough.”

They passed a small farmhouse, just a rough sod hut. In a yard of red mud, children were playing — they looked like human children, a boy and a girl. They gazed at the approaching party, then ran into the hut. A man emerged from the hut, stripped to the waist, bare-headed. He looked apprehensive.

From his Runner mount, Sprigge nodded to him. “No tithes to collect today, George.”

“Aye, Master Sprigge.” The man George nodded back, cordially enough, but his eyes were wary, fixed on Sprigge as if he were a predator.

They moved on, following the river as it worked its way towards the Beltway forest. As the land became less arid, the cultivation spread away from the river bank. Soon Malenfant was surrounded by fields, toiling hominids, an occasional human. It might have been a scene from some vision of the old west, or maybe the European Middle Ages, if not for the humanoid forms of the beasts of burden here, the unmistakably Neandertal features of their supervisors, and the unremitting crimson glower of the land itself.

But this was a genuine colony, he thought, a growing community, for all its ugliness — unlike the dying, etiolated English camp.

Rain began to fall. The rough path by the river bank soon turned to mud, and the party trudged on in miserable silence. Malenfant tucked his head closer to Julia’s chest. With remarkable kindness she leaned over him and sheltered him from the rain with her own bare back, and Malenfant could not find the strength to protest.

Again he dozed.

When he woke, he was dumped on his feet. They had reached the Zealot fortress, it seemed.

They were in a clearing, surrounded by dense wood; Malenfant hadn’t even noticed they had come back to the forest. Ditches, ramparts, gates and drawbridges stretched all the way around the township. Sharpened stakes were stuck in the sides of the ramparts, so that the compound bristled, like some great hedgehog of wood and mud.

A big gate was opened. They were pushed inside.

The encampment was a place of rambling muddy paths and ugly, low-tech buildings placed haphazardly. There was one central building that looked more sturdily built, mud brick on a wooden frame, like a chapel. Aside from that, the huts were so rough they seemed to have grown out of the debris that littered the muddy ground. They were built of stripped saplings and wattles, and laid over with palm fronds. Everything showed signs of much use and recycling; here was half of what looked like a dugout canoe, for example, serving as a chicken-coop.

There were no straight lines anywhere, no squares or rectangles, no hard edges; everything was sloppy, all the lines blurred. It was as if the first arrivals here had just marked out trails where they wandered and put up their wattle-and daub huts where they felt like. There was none of the regularity and discipline of the British compound:

Malenfant sensed McCann’s impatience at this disorderliness.

Malenfant’s arms were untied. He could barely move them because of cramp, and he could feel where the cord had cut into his wrists.

With McCann, he was pushed into a dark, stinking sod hut. He couldn’t see what had become of Julia. The hut was dark, the floor was just mud, uneven. A door of saplings bound together by liana twine blocked the door.

Malenfant limped to a dark corner and slumped there. The floor was greasy and black; when he lifted his hand a great slick sheen came away with it. The whole place stank like a toilet.

Termite passageways, like the stems of some dead plant, curled up the walls and disappeared into the wooden beams and the thatch. A gecko clambered across the ceiling, incurious.

He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since being hit over the head by the Zealots. He felt as if he had been systematically pummelled, all over his body, with a baseball bat. And here he was in some quasi-medieval prison block, lying in filth. The world he had come from — of NASA and Houston and Washington, of computers and phones and cars and planes — seemed utterly unreal, evanescent as the shining surface of a bubble, a dream.

What a mess, he thought.

McCann was waxing enthusiastic. “I see the pattern, Malenfant. The Hams and Runners surely do not have the wit to be rebellious or to long for escape; unlike human slaves it is unlikely they can conceive of freedom. Besides, if you get them young enough, you can quite easily break their spirits, as with a young horse. If each man controls, say, ten of the Ham bosses, and then each Ham in turn controls ten Runners, you have a formidable army of workers. And at the top of it you have this fellow Praisegod Michael of whom Sprigge has spoken, who creams off the tithes. It is like a vast, spreading, self-sustaining—”

“Prison camp,” Malenfant said sourly.

“Oh, much more than that, Malenfant. Think how carefully the strata of this little society are defined. You have the humans, with of course their own ranks and order. Beneath them you have your Hams, who in turn lord it over the Runners. And since in this case each lower rank is clearly the intellectual inferior of that above, you have a social order that reflects the natural order. It is a hierarchy as stable as a cathedral.”

Malenfant growled, “I thought you despised the Zealots. You wouldn’t tell me a damn word about them.”

“I think I am beginning to see I have underestimated them, Malenfant. Oh, this is a place of repellent squalor, of blood and mud. It is cruel, Malenfant. I don’t deny it. But those subject to the greatest cruelty, as far as I can see, are those least capable of perceiving it. And as a social arrangement it is intricate and marvellous. One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.”

He sounded brittle, almost feverish, Malenfant thought dully. This bizarre mood of his, this fan-worship of the Zealots, could probably evaporate as fast as it had come.

The hell with it. Malenfant closed his eyes.

But still, he saw Emma’s face in his mind’s eye, bright and clear, as if she stood before him. He probed a pocket on his sleeve. The spyglass lens still nestled there, hard and round under his fingers, comforting.

McCann went to a window — just a hole in the wall, unglazed. He called, “We need water and food. And tell him, Sprigge! Tell your Praisegod Michael we are Englishmen! It will go worse for you if you fail!”

McCann shook him awake. “We have an invitation to dinner, Malenfant! How jolly exciting.”

A sullen Zealot had brought them a wooden pail of water. They both inspected this suspiciously; they were ferociously thirsty, but in the dim light diffusing from the window, the water looked cloudy.

McCann shrugged. “Needs must.” He plunged his hands into the water and scooped up mouthfuls, which he gulped down.

Malenfant followed suit. The water tasted sour, but it had no odour.

When they were done they used the rest of the water to wash themselves. Malenfant cleaned dried blood and grit out of wounds on his bare feet, wrists and neck.

McCann used the water to slick down his hair. He even produced a tie from one jacket pocket and knotted it around his neck. “Impression is everything,” he said to Malenfant. “Outer form. Get that right and the rest follows. Eh?”

The door was pushed open, its leather hinges creaking. Sprigge walked in, looking as dusty as when they had all walked in from the plains. “You have your wish, gentlemen.” He raised his fist. “But any defiance or dissimulation and you’ll know my wrath.”

McCann and Malenfant nodded silently.

They were led out of the hut, into a broad compound. It was raining, and the evening was drawing in. The ground was just red dirt, hard-packed by the passage of human feet. But it was heavily rain-soaked, and Malenfant felt the mud seep between his naked toes.

People moved between the huts, carrying food and tools or leading children by the hand. They seemed to be humans, but they were small, skinny, stunted folk, dressed in filthy skin rags. There were no lanterns, and the only light inside the huts came from fire hearths.

McCann murmured to him like a tour guide. “They do not approach us; the authority of this Praisegod Michael of theirs is binding. Look there. I think that hut yonder is a house of ill-fame.”

“A what?… Oh. A brothel.”

“Yes, but a brothel stocked with Runners — women and boys, so far as I can tell. There are contradictions here, Malenfant. We have a community run by this Praisegod fellow, seemingly on rigid religious lines. And yet here is a bordello operating openly.”

The rain grew heavier. The Zealot compound was turning to a muddy swamp. The buildings seemed to slump in defeat, as if sliding back down into the earth from which they had been dragged. And the people, humans. Runners and Hams alike were wan figures, all the same dun colour, images of misery.

McCann stamped through puddles contemptuously. “These people don’t know what they are doing,” he barked. “We coped rather better. Culverts! Storm drains!” And with broad sweeps of his arms he sketched an ambitious drainage system.

They were brought to the compound’s central structure, the solid-looking chapel. Well, maybe it really was a chapel; now Malenfant saw it had a narrow spire.

Sprigge led the two of them along a short, dark hallway. Grilles of tightly interwoven wooden laths were set in the floor. Malenfant glanced down. He thought he saw movement, eyes peering up at him. But the light was uncertain.

They arrived at a large, bright room. It had neat rectangular windows unglazed, but covered with sheets of what looked like woven and scraped palm leaves, so that they admitted a cool yellow light. Lanterns burned on the walls, each just a stone bowl cupping oil within which a wick floated, burning smokily. At the head of the room was a stone fireplace, impressively constructed from heavy red blocks — perhaps ejecta from the crater field they had crossed. No fire burned beneath the blackened chimney stack, but there was a large, impressive crucifix set over the fireplace. At the other end of the room was a plain altar, set with goblets and plates, all of it carved from wood.

At the centre of the room was a small, unevenly made, polished wooden table. A man sat behind the table, eating steadily. There were no plates; the man ate bits of fish and meat off what looked like slabs of thick bread.

The man wore a black robe that swept to the ground, with a napkin thrown over his shoulder. A band of silver-grey hair surrounding a crown that looked shaved, like a tonsure. His narrow face was disfigured by warts.

This was, presumably, Praisegod Michael. He ignored Malenfant and McCann.

Behind Praisegod two Ham women stood, backed up against the wall. They were both dressed in modest, all-covering dresses of soft leather, and they kept their eyes on the floor.

Sprigge nudged McCann, and indicated they should sit on the floor before the table. McCann complied readily enough. Malenfant followed his lead. Sprigge stepped back, and took a station at the corner of the room.

As Praisegod Michael ate, everybody in the room waited in silence.

Malenfant couldn’t take his eyes off the food.

There was a puree of what looked like chicken mixed in with rice and some kind of nuts. An animal like a young piglet, roasted, had been carved and set before Michael, and he picked at its white flesh. Other side dishes included some kind of beans cooked in what smelled like meat stock, and mushrooms in a kind of cream, and a green salad. There was even wine — or anyhow it looked like wine, served in a delicately carved wooden goblet.

At length Praisegod Michael slowed down. More than half the piglet was left on its serving plate. Michael belched, and mopped his lip with a scrap of cloth.

Then he looked up, directly into Malenfant’s eyes. Malenfant was jolted by the intensity of his gaze.

One of the Ham women behind him stepped forward. Malenfant was startled to recognize Julia. With heavy grace she took the unfinished dishes from Michael, and set them on the floor before McCann and Malenfant.

Malenfant reached straight for the pork, but McCann touched his arm.

McCann closed his eyes. “For this blessing. Lord, we thank you.”

Michael watched coldly. Now McCann began to eat, using his fingers to tear at the pork.

Malenfant followed suit.

Michael spoke. “Your Ham girl is well-tempered,” he said to Malenfant. His voice was deep, commanding, but his accent was powerfully strange.

Malenfant said, “She isn’t my anything.”

McCann said quickly, “She has an even nature, and is wise for a Ham.”

Michael’s gaze swivelled to McCann. “I know of you, or at least men who speak like you. Once one was brought here.”

McCann blanched. “Russell. Is he—”

“He died for his sins.”

There was a long silence. McCann’s eyes were closed, even as he chewed steadily on the meat. Then he said carefully, “There are only a handful of us — a handful, and Hams and Runners. We have no women, no children. We are weak old men,” he said, looking directly at Michael. “We are no threat to your — umm, your expansion.”

Michael got out of his chair. Tall, cadaverously thin, his arms clasped before his belly, he walked around the table and studied McCann and Malenfant. “My soldiers will spare them.”

“They live in God,” McCann said fervently.

Michael nodded. “Then let them die in God. But you talk of an expansion.”

McCann said hastily, “I am sorry if—”

“Whenever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down, for He alone will be exalted,” said Praisegod Michael. His speech was rapid, his delivery flat. He laid his hand on Julia’s flat brow; she did not react. “My language is not of kingdoms and kings, empires and emperors. No king I, but a Protector,” he said.

McCann was nodding vigorously. “I see that. Yes, I see that. As men we are different — we come from different worlds — but differences between men are as nothing compared to the gulf between men and animals. There are few enough strong men scattered over this world, Praisegod Michael, to shoulder the responsibility.”

Michael regarded him. “God hath poured this confused nation from vessel to vessel, until He poured it into my lap. Perhaps it is divine providence that brings you here.”

McCann smiled. “Providence, by God’s dispensation. Indeed.”

Praisegod Michael turned to Malenfant. “And what of this one? His eye is defiant, his accent strange. What is your religion, man? Popish? Atheistical?”

McCann said quickly, “His faith is as strong as mine.”

Michael smiled thinly. “Then perhaps he will have the courage to say it for himself.” He seemed to come to a decision. “You are right. There are few enough decent men here. But can I trust you?… Tomorrow we hunt. Accompany me, and we will talk further.” He knelt before his altar, his eyes closed.

Sprigge motioned Malenfant and McCann to follow him out of the room.

Back in their crude hut, McCann seemed excited. “He is English — that is clear enough — but I would say that his history must have split off from our own no later than our seventeenth century… Perhaps you number your dates differently. Well, it looks as if the Zealots have been here since then. But they seem to have made no significant progress, socially or mechanically, since those days…”

Malenfant said sourly, “What difference does it make?”

“We understood each other, Malenfant. Don’t you see? Myself and this Praisegod. His is a faith which has much in common with my own. He spoke of providences. Through providences, you see, God intervenes in the world, to make His will visible. And I have no doubt that Praisegod will count himself among the Elect that is, those who are already destined to be saved — but he has surely been cast in a world of Reprobates, the already damned.” He smiled, and his eyes glinted in the dark. “I understand him. I can do business with this man.”

Malenfant frowned. “But his ‘business’ seems to be to enslave those he regards as lesser than him.”

“Ah, but that’s the delicious irony of it all, Malenfant — oh, but I forget, you slept and did not see — I spied a man coming out of the Runner bawdy-house, his trousers dangling around his knees. A more unspeakable wretch you never saw. But I could make out clearly that he had a tail. Malenfant, our grandiloquent Praisegod Michael, the saviour of the world, has a monkey’s tail!”

After a minute, Malenfant began to laugh. McCann joined in. Once they started, they couldn’t stop.

Joshua:

Joshua and Mary, breathing hard, stepped gingerly over crushed branches and uprooted shrubs. They reached the edge of the cliff and peered down. The sky seed still lay where it had fallen, when they had pushed it over the cliff: trapped well below the lip of the cliff, pinned by a ledge and a thick knot of shrubbery.

Joshua grinned. Every few days he had come clambering up the trail to this battered clearing, to see again what they had done to the sky seed.

The seed was safe here. The feeble muscles of the Zealots would never succeed in hauling this prize up from such a place — and the Nutcracker-folk, though good climbers, were surely too stupid even to envisage such a thing. Only the People of the Grey Earth, with their brains and powerful bodies, could retrieve the sky seed from where it rested, pinned against the cliff’s grey breast -

Voices screamed, all around them.

They whirled, shocked.

There were only trees and bushes and leaves, some of them shaking violently, as if in a wind, though there was no wind.

From nowhere a spear flew. It lanced into Joshua’s shoulder, neatly puncturing it through.

He was knocked back. He fell on the spear. It twisted, and there was savage pain.

And now something new descended over him, a thing of ropes and threads knotted together, that tangled up his legs and arms and head.

Leaves and twigs fell away, and suddenly there were people: men, all around them. They were Skinnies. They carried spears and knives that glinted. Still screaming, they threw themselves forward. It had all happened in a heartbeat, overwhelming, bewildering. The Zealots had just melted out of the trees: one instant they were not there, the next they were there, an overwhelming magic beyond Joshua’s experience.

Their blows and kicks were feeble, but there were many of them, and they clung to Joshua’s limbs while punching his stomach and chest and head. He heard Mary cry out, an angry, fearful roar.

“…Looks like Tobias was right. A fine old pair we trapped here!”

“Wrap up yon buck and give us a hand with the maid, will you? She’s struggling like a bear…”

Joshua lay passively, defeated by shock as much as the spear, peering up at the indifferent sun. He saw that the men had got Mary on the ground, and had ripped open her skins.

“By the tears of the Lord—”

“Get her legs. Get her legs.”

“The buck is for the minister. This one’s for us, eh, lads?”

“Face like a bear but the tits of an angel. She’s going to take a bit of stilling, though…”

Joshua came to himself. With a bellow he wrenched himself over, rolling onto his belly. Zealots, yelling, went flying. For a moment he was free of their weight and their blows. But the spear ground into the dirt, opening his wound wider, and he cried out.

But Joshua’s struggle had distracted Mary’s attackers, and she had got one arm loose. With a fist more massive than any Skinny’s, she pounded at the temple of one of her assailants. Joshua heard the crunch of bone; a Zealot went down.

“God’s wounds. Peter — Peter!”

“Get her, lads!—”

Mary struggled to her feet, her ripped skins swinging, her small breasts glistening with blood. She had her back to the forest. The men, all save the fallen one, made a half-circle to face her, wielding their weapons. Their lust had been replaced by caution, Joshua saw, for even a half-mature Ham girl, if free, was more than a match for any one of the Skinnies.

But she could not defeat them all.

With a last, regretful glance at Joshua, she turned and crashed into the trees. Though she made an immense racket, she had soon disappeared, and Joshua knew that the Zealots could not follow her.

He let his head slump to the blood-soaked ground beneath his face.

A shadow crossed him. “This is for Peter.”

A boot hurtled at his face.

Reid Malenfant:

The morning after their capture, Malenfant and McCann found their door was not barred, no guard posted.

They crept out into light still tinged grey with dawn.

Already the business of the day was starting. Runners and Hams were working silently to sweep the ground clear of yesterday’s debris, and to fill the water casks that sat outside each hut. It was strange to see specimens of Homo neandertalensis and Erectus dressed in crudely sewn parodies of clothing, their heads and bodies strikingly misshapen in the uncertain dawn light, coming and going as they pursued their chores. It was like a mockery of a human township.

Away from the Zealots, neither Hams nor Runners made any attempt to use human language; they simply got through their work with steady dullness, united in blank misery.

There was a specialized group of Runners who were used solely to carry passengers. Some of them wore primitive harnesses. But these unfortunates were stooped, with over-developed shoulders and necks, and what looked like permanent curves to their backs. Their shoulders and thighs bore bright red weals.

Malenfant said, “Look at those scars. These Zealot jockeys don’t spare the whip.”

McCann grunted, impatient. “Have you much experience in the husbandry of animals, Malenfant? None of them look terribly old, do they? — I would wager that under excessive loading their bodies break down rather rapidly once the flush of youth is over.

“But the whip is surely necessary. In Africa I knew a man who tried to train elephants. You may know that while your Indian elephant has been tamed by the locals for centuries, your African runs wild. My acquaintance struggled to master his elephants, even though he imported experienced mahouts from India; freedom runs in the blood of those African tuskers, and they are far more intelligent than, say, a horse.”

“Hence the whip.”

“Yes. For it is only by severe and strict punishment that such intelligent beasts can be controlled. Even then, of course, you can never be sure; even in India the tamest-looking elephant with a grudge against his mahout may wait years, decades — but he will take his one chance and gore or trample his tormentor, careless of his fate.

“Now your Runner, who is after all a man, if a different stripe of man, is surely more intelligent than an elephant. Hence, as you say, the whip. And perhaps other practices have been developed. See there — that grizzled, rather bent old chap is tied up to the boy.” The old man and the boy, sitting in the dirt, listless and naked, were attached by tight bonds around their ankles. “If you want to break an animal you will sometimes put him in with an older beast. The tamed creature may prove an example in the work to be done, and so forth. But in addition the young perceives there is no hope, you see, and quits his rebelliousness sooner.”

Malenfant said, “I don’t understand why these Runners don’t just up and get out of here.”

McCann pulled his walrus moustache. “These boys have probably been in captivity since they were very young — either born here, or wrest from their dead mothers” arms in the wild. They know nothing else; they cannot imagine freedom. And these wretches could not run off if you turned them free tomorrow. See how they limp the scars on the backs of their ankles? Hamstrung. Perhaps that explains their demeanour of defeat. They are creatures evolved, surely, for one thing above all else — running — and if they cannot run any more, they have no aspiration. Perhaps it is humane to excise the very possibility of escape; believe me, hope harms a creature far more than despair ever did…”

Praisegod Michael emerged from his chapel-like residence. His black robe flapped about his ankles, heavy, as he walked. He threw his arms wide, loudly sniffing the air. Then he fell to his knees, bowed his head, and began to pray.

Praisegod’s hunting party formed up rapidly. There were to be five humans (or near-humans) — Praisegod, his man Sprigge and one Other Zealot, and Malenfant and McCann — along with four Hams, and ten Runner bearers.

One of the Hams was just a child, about the size of a human ten-year-old. This boy seemed dressed in clothing of a somewhat finer cut than most of the Zealots. Praisegod kept him close by, sometimes resting his hand on the boy’s flattened skull, or cupping him under his chinless jaw. The boy submitted to this, and ran small errands for Praisegod.

Five of the Runners were to carry equipment — home-made spears and crossbows. The rest were there to carry the humans.

Malenfant’s mount was to be one of the older, more broken-down specimens he had observed that morning. The hominid stood before him, as tall as Malenfant despite his stoop, his very human eyes empty of expression.

Malenfant flatly refused to climb aboard his shoulders.

McCann leaned towards him. “For God’s sake, Malenfant,” he hissed.

Praisegod Michael watched this with a thin amusement. “Do you imagine you spare this stooped one discomfort or indignity? There is no soul behind those deceptive eyes, sir, to experience such complicated passions. I trust your compassion will not pour away when your bare feet are bleeding and sore… But perhaps you are right; he is rather worn down.” He nodded to Sprigge.

Sprigge tapped the old Runner’s elbow, and he obediently knelt on the ground. Sprigge stepped behind him and drew a knife from his belt — metal, very old, sharpened and polished until the blade was a thin, fragile remnant.

“Shit.” Malenfant lunged forward, but McCann grabbed his arm.

Distracted by the commotion, the Runner saw the knife. His battered face twisted in animal rage. He started to rise, perhaps for the first time in his life defying those who used him.

But Sprigge wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his back. He sliced the knife through the old Runner’s throat. Blood spurted, a brighter red shining in the crimson dirt. Still the Runner fought; he didn’t stop struggling until his head had been all but sawn off his body.

McCann released Malenfant. “The rogue elephant and the mahout, Malenfant,” he whispered grimly. “And if you defy, you will only make matters worse for the creatures here.”

“Thank you, sir,” Praisegod said to Malenfant, his look calculating, mocking. “You perceived a lack which I have been remiss in correcting. Well, it is done, and the sun is already high. Come now.” And he slapped the face of his own mount, who trotted away to the west, away from the rising sun.

The others hastily mounted, and the hunting party proceeded at a steady jog after Praisegod, the Runners” bare feet thumping into the earth, the Hams following the graceful Runners as best they could with their awkward, bow-legged style.

They reached the fringe of the forest, and moved out onto the plain.

The forest floor hadn’t been so bad for Malenfant’s bare feet, save for bites, for which he’d no doubt suffer later. But after a half-mile of desert his feet were aching and bloody. And as the miles wore away he began to dig deep into his already shallow reserves of energy. Malenfant knew they had had no choice but to go along with Praisegod Michael’s invitation to join his hunt, which was obviously some kind of bullshit character test. He tried to see it as an opportunity. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

He found his thoughts dissolving, his purpose reducing merely to a determination to keep one foot moving in front of the others, to show no weakness.

The weather fell apart. A lid of boiling cloud settled over the sky, making the small world seem flat and enclosed, washing the colours out of everything. And then the rain came, a ferocious storm that stippled the crimson sand with miniature craters. Much of the water drained quickly into the dry soil, but soon rivulets were running over the ground, and the sand turned into clinging mud.

Praisegod called a halt. The humans dismounted. Malenfant rested, hands on his knees, breathing deep of the thin air.

Under the brisk supervision of the Hams, the Runners unloaded sheets of sewn together leather. They quickly put together a kind of tepee.

The Zealots, with McCann and Malenfant, huddled in the tepee. Inside there was a stink of old leather and damp bodies and clothing. The other hominids were excluded — all save Praisegod’s Ham boy, who snuggled close to the Zealot; Praisegod stroked his cheek with in-turned fingers. The other Hams had a few sections of skin that they held up over themselves, to keep the rain off their heads.

As for the Runners, they had no shelter at all. They huddled together under a rain so thick it turned the air grey, their knees tucked into their chests, naked, visibly shivering.

McCann saw Malenfant watching the Runners. “You should not concern yourself,” he said. “In the wild they have no conception of shelter. If it rains they get wet; if they catch a chill they die. Nothing in their present circumstances changes that.”

Praisegod had been reading passages in a book, a clumsy thing of scraped-leather pages, presumably a Bible or a prayer book. He leaned forward, as if trying to find a more comfortable position for the comical, stubby tail he must have curled up under his robe. “I suspect you fear the rain, Malenfant.”

Malenfant frowned. “Ah, bullshit. All this turbulent weather has got to be a result of that new Earth in the sky. It’s a bigger world: you’re going to get tides, “quakes, atmospheric disruptions—”

“Your language is a jabber. Perhaps you believe the rain will wash away this puny world, and you along with it. Well, it will not; for if this island resisted the very Flood itself, a little local rain will not harm it now.”

“Ah.” McCann was smiling. Malenfant could tell what he was thinking. This is what this guy believes. Don’t say anything to contradict him. McCann said, “We are on an island, an island that survived the Flood. Yes, of course.” He glanced out at the huddled Runners. “And that explains them.”

Praisegod said, “They are less than men yet more than the animals. What can they be but Homo diluvii testi — witnesses of the Flood? This island was spared the rising waters; and so were its inhabitants, who must have crowded here with the ignorant instincts of any animal.”

“Then,” said McCann carefully, “we are privileged to glimpse the antediluvian order of things.”

“Privileged or damned,” Sprigge muttered, staring at the Neandertal boy on Praisegod’s lap. “This place is an abomination.”

“Not an abomination,” snapped Praisegod. “It is like a strange reflected Creation. Man was born to look up at the orders of beings above him, the angels, prophets, saints and apostles, who serve the Holy Trinity. Here, we look down, down on these creatures with men’s hands and faces and even tongues, but creatures without mind or soul, who sprawl in the mud.”

They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust. But Malenfant slowly learned something of Praisegod Michael.

The Zealot township had been a godless place when Praisegod was a child, given to anarchy and lawlessness, weakened by the endless green lure of the forest. But — so Michael was told by his parents — God was involved in every detail of life. God watched the daily deeds of men and punished their sins, and the Elect — those who obeyed God’s law — would be saved. Praisegod learned this in prayer and torment, in misery and distrust, at the hands of what sounded to Malenfant like abusive parents.

And then they abandoned him, just melted away into the bush, leaving the child to the tender mercies of the townspeople.

Life had been very hard for the young Praisegod, it seemed. But eventually he had rediscovered the religion inside himself. He drew strength from this inner core. And when the growing, toughening Praisegod had come to see that he himself was one of the Elect, his duty had become clear: to devote himself to God’s fight and the establishment of His kingdom on this fragmentary world.

He had pursued that goal from then on with an ever-burning zeal and an unswerving fixity of purpose that had turned this gaunt, lisping, wart-ridden preacher into something like a man of true destiny.

But there was a cost, of course.

To the Zealots, it seemed to Malenfant, the other hominids, the pre-sapients, barely even existed. They had no language, no clothing, no religion, and therefore they had absolutely no rights under God or man. They were animals, no more than that, regardless of the curiosity of their gaze, the pain in their cries, their misery in enslavement: simply a resource for exploitation.

Malenfant leaned forward. “I’m curious. What do you want, Praisegod Michael? What do you want to achieve among all these animals?”

Michael’s eyes were bright. “I seek only to emulate Ramose, who led his nation out of Egypt to the land of Canaan…” Malenfant soon realized that this “Ramose” was a kind of analogue of Moses from his own timeline, like the John who had replaced Christ in McCann’s history. “I believe I have seen the providence of God, for surely it is by His dispensation I have been given my place here. And I have no choice but to follow that providence.”

McCann seemed to be growing agitated. “But one must search for the truth of providences, Praisegod Michael. One must be wary of the exaltation of the self.”

Michael just laughed. “You have not lived in this land long. You will learn that it is only I who stand between these mindless apes and chaos itself.” His hands, apparently without conscious volition, stroked the Neandertal boy’s broad chest. He glanced out of the tepee’s flap door; the rain had slackened. “Come. Time enough for theology later. For now there is a hunt to be made, bellies to be filled.” And he led the way out of the tepee.

“The man is too much,” McCann said, glowering at Praisegod’s back. “He takes divinity on himself. He is close to blasphemy. He likens himself to Bay — that is, his own twisted version of Bay.” Malenfant guessed that Bay was another of Moses” parallel-historical pseudonyms. “Malenfant, the man is a self aggrandizing monster. He must be stopped. Otherwise, what will come to pass, as Praisegod’s blasphemous hordes swarm like locusts over this wretched Moon?”

Malenfant shrugged. For all McCann’s talk of Praisegod’s ambitions, he found it hard to take seriously anybody who lived in a mud hut. “He’s vicious. But he’s a shithead. Anyhow I thought you were going to do business with him.”

McCann glared at him, angry, frustrated. And Malenfant saw that McCann’s mood had switched, just as he had feared. It was as if a veneer had been stripped away.

Malenfant felt only dismay. He just wanted to get out of here; if McCann went off the rails, he had no idea how he was going to handle the situation.

Now there was a commotion up ahead. Sprigge had reached the huddle of Hams. Two of them were standing unsteadily, while the third sprawled in the mud. Sprigge began to beat the Hams vigorously.

“It is the wine,” Praisegod remarked. “They steal it from us and hide it in their clothing. Though their bellies are large, their brains are small, and they cannot take it as men can.”

The Runners watched apathetically as the Hams were chastised.

The sky cleared rapidly. Through high thin clouds the sunlight returned. The red dust began to steam under their feet, making the air humid.

A little after noon, they reached the fringe of a belt of dense forest. They made a rough camp in the shade of the wood, spreading out their clothes and goods to dry. The Runners were tied up by their necks or ankles to tree trunks, but were able to forage for food among the roots of the trees.

McCann nodded. “Efficient. It saves their carrying their own provision. And while their fingers are nimble with food, their minds are too empty to puzzle out knots.”

Sprigge was to lead a hunting party into the forest. He would take four Runners, and — as a punishment — all three Hams, who seemed to have crashed into catastrophic hangovers. Both McCann and Malenfant were invited to join them; McCann agreed to go, but Malenfant refused.

Praisegod settled down on a sheet of leather. The other Zealot, a squat, silent man, dug foodstuffs from out of the Runners” packs and laid them out. Praisegod nibbled on nuts, fruit and dried meat; he pressed titbits into the mouth of his Ham boy, fingering the child’s lips each time.

Malenfant sat in the dirt, waiting for a turn at the food. The silent Zealot sat alone some distance away, chewing on something that looked like beef jerky; he watched Malenfant warily.

Praisegod said, “So you declined to join the hunt, Sir Malenfant.” He smiled coldly. “You are not a hunter, then — not a woodsman or a man of the heath either, I would say. What, then? A scholar?”

“A sailor, I guess.”

“A sailor.” Praisegod chewed thoughtfully. “In my father’s day some effort was made to escape this antediluvian island. Men took to the desert, which stretches west of this place. And they built boats and took to the sea, which stretches away to the east. Most did not come back, from either longitude. Those who did reported only emptiness — deserts of sand or water, the land populated by lowly forms. Of course you and your friend have yet to confess what marvellous ship, or providential accident, brought you here.”

“So that you can use it to get out of here,” Malenfant said cautiously. “Is that what you want?”

Praisegod said, “I do not long for escape. I know what you want, Reid Malenfant, for I have discussed your state of mind with your wiser companion. You seek your wife. You have wagered your life, in fact, on finding her. It is a goal with some nobility, but a goal of the body, not the soul.”

Malenfant smiled coldly. “It’s all I have.”

The hunting party returned.

Two of the Runners carried limp, hairy bodies, slung over their shoulders. They looked to Malenfant like the chimp-like Elf-folk. One was an adult, but the other was an infant, just a scrap of brown-black fur. The other two Runners bore a net slung on a horizontal pole. A third Elf squirmed within the net, frightened, angry, jabbering, a bundle of muscle and fur and long, human-like limbs. Malenfant could see heavy, milk-laden breasts.

Praisegod got up to greet the party, an expression of anticipation on his cadaverous face. His Ham boy clung to Praisegod’s robe and stayed behind him, evidently frightened of the Elf’s jabber. Under Sprigge’s sharp commands, two of the Runners and the Hams set to constructing a large fire, with a spit set over it.

McCann approached Malenfant, his hands scratched by branches and brambles, his face red with exertion. His mood seemed to have swung again. “Quite an adventure, Malenfant! — you should have seen it. The Runners are remarkable. They crept like shadows through that forest, closing on those helpless pongids like Death himself. They caught these three, and though the Elves fought, our fellows would have despatched them all in seconds if not for Sprigge’s command…”

The Hams had wrestled the live Elf to the ground, and were cautiously lifting away the net. The Elf squirmed and spat — and Malenfant thought she looked longingly at the corpse of the infant, piled carelessly on top of the adult’s body. Perhaps she was the child’s mother.

Praisegod walked around the little campsite until he had found a fist-sized rock. He turned to Malenfant, holding out the rock. “Sir, you omitted the hunt. Will you share in the kill?”

Malenfant folded his arms.

“No?” Praisegod motioned to Sprigge.

Now, at a sharp command from Sprigge, a Runner approached, bearing a fire hardened spear. With a single powerful gesture he skewered the Elf, ramming the pole into her body through her anus, pushing until its tip emerged bloody from her mouth.

This time it was Malenfant who had to restrain McCann.

The Elf was still alive when the Hams lifted the pole onto the spit frames Malenfant heard her body rip as it slumped around its impaling pole — and, he thought, she was still alive, if barely, when a burly Runner went to work on her skull, curling back the flesh and cracking the skull as if it was the shell of a boiled egg.

Praisegod studied Malenfant. “Perhaps it would have been merciful to kill it first. Or perhaps not; this creature cannot comprehend its fate in any case. It is the brains, you see; freshness is all for that particular delicacy.”

McCann broke away from Malenfant. He strode towards Praisegod Michael, his fists bunched, his face purple. “Now I know what you are, Praisegod. No Bay, no Ramose! Him the Almighty Power I Huri’d headlong flaming from th” Ethereal Sky I With hideous ruin and combustion down I To bottomless perdition. You are no man of God. This is Hell, and you are its Satan!”

Sprigge slammed his fist into the back of McCann’s head, and the Englishman went sprawling.

Praisegod Michael seemed unperturbed. “Blasphemy and anarchy, sir. Flogging, branding and tongue-boring will be your fate. That is God’s law, as I have interpreted it.”

McCann tried to rise. But Sprigge kicked his backside, knocking him flat again. Two of the Runners ripped McCann’s jacket from his back, exposing an expanse of pasty skin, and Sprigge loosened his whip.

Malenfant watched this, his own fists bunched.

Don’t do it, Malenfant. This isn’t your argument; it’s not even your damn world. Think of Emma. She is all that matters.

But as Sprigge raised his arm for the first lash, Malenfant hit him in the mouth, hard enough to knock him flat.

He didn’t remember much after that.

Shadow:

For days after her latest beating at One-eye’s hands. Shadow had stayed in her nest. There was a little fruit here, and dew to be sucked from the leaves. She found something like contentment, simply to be left in peace.

But the child developed rashes on his belly and inner thighs, and Shadow herself lost a lot of hair around her groin. Her hair, and the child’s, were matted with urine and faeces. In her illness she had failed to clean the child, or herself when the child fouled her.

She clambered down from the tree and set the child on the ground. When Shadow propped him up the child was actually able to sit up by himself — wobbling, his legs tangled, that great strange head bobbing like a heavy fruit, but sitting up nevertheless. She bathed him gently, with cool clean water from a stream. The coolness made the rash subside. The child’s infection was subsiding too, and his nose was almost free of snot.

The child clapped his little hands together, looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and gazed up at his mother with wide eyes.

Shadow embraced him, suddenly overwhelmed by her feelings, warm and deep red and powerful.

And a great mass caromed into her back, knocking her flat.

Her child was screaming. She forced herself to her knees and turned her head.

One-eye had the infant. He was sitting on the ground, holding the baby by his waist. The child’s heavy head lolled to and fro. One-eye was flanked by two younger men, who watched him intently. One-eye flicked the side of the child’s skull with a bloody finger, making the head roll further.

Shadow got to her feet. Her back was a mass of bruises. She walked forward unsteadily, and with every step pain lanced. She stood before One-eye and held her hands out for her child.

One-eye clutched the child closer to his chest, not roughly, and the child scrabbled at his fur, seeking to cling on. The other men watched Shadow with a cold calculation.

Shadow stood there, bewildered, hot, exhausted, aching. She didn’t know what One-eye wanted. She sat on the ground and lay back, opening her legs for him.

One-eye grinned. He held the child before him. And he bit into the front of its head. The child shuddered once, then was limp.

Shadow’s world dissolved into crimson rage. She was aware of the child’s body being hurled into the air, blood still streaming from the wound in his head, as limp as a chewed leaf. She lunged at One-eye, screaming in his face, clawing and biting. One-eye was knocked flat on the ground, and he raised his hands before his bloody face to ward off her blows.

Then the other men got hold of her shoulders and dragged her away. She kicked and fought, but she was weakened by her long deprivation, her heatings and her illness; she was no match for two burly men. At last they took her by an arm and a leg. They swung her in the air and hurled her against a broad tree trunk.

The men were still there, One-eye and the others, sitting in a tight circle on the ground. They were working at something. She heard the rip of flesh, smelled the stink of blood. She tried to rise, but could not, and she fell back into darkness.

The next time she woke she was alone. The light was gone, and only pale yellow Earthlight, filtered through the forest canopy, littered the ground.

She crawled to where the men had been sitting.

She picked up one small arm. A strip of gristle at the shoulder showed where it had been twisted from the torso. The hand was still in place, perfectly formed, clenched into a tiny fist.

She was high in a tree, in a roughly prepared nest. She didn’t remember getting there. It was day, the sun high and hot.

She remembered her baby. She remembered the tiny hand.

By the time she clambered down from the tree, her determination was as pure as fast-running water.

Emma Stoney:

Emma trudged wearily over the soft sand of the ocean shore. The ocean itself was a sheet of steel, visibly curving at the horizon, and big low-gravity waves washed across it languidly.

This strip of yellow-white beach lay between the ocean and a stretch of low dunes. Further inland she saw a grassy plain, a blanket of green that rippled as the wind touched it, studded here and there by knots of trees. A herd of grazing animals moved slowly across the plain, their collective motion flowing, almost liquid; they looked like huge wild horses. The stretch of savannah ended in a cliff of some dark volcanic rock, and a dense forest spilled over the lip of the cliff, a thick green-black. It was a scene of life, of geological and biological harmony, characterized by the scale and slow pace of this world. In any other context it might have been beautiful.

But Emma walked warily, the rags of her flight suit flapping around her, her loose pack strapped to her back with bits of vegetable rope, a wooden spear in one hand and a basalt axe in the other. Beautiful or not, this was a world full of dangerous predators — not least, the humans.

And then she saw a flash of blue fabric, high on the cliff.

She walked up the beach towards the cliff, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart.

Every day her mood swung between elation and feverish hope, to bitterness that bordered on despair. One day at a time, Emma. Think like a Ham. Take it one day at a time.

But now she could see the lander itself. She broke into a run, staring, wishing her eyes had a zoom feature.

It was unmistakably NASA technology, like a stubby scale-model Space Shuttle, with black and white protective tiles. It was surrounded by shreds of its blue parafoil. But it was stuck in a clump of trees, halfway down the cliff; it looked like some fat moth clinging to the rock.

“Nice landing, Malenfant,” she murmured.

Disturbingly, she saw no sign that anybody had done anything constructive up there. There were no ropes leading up or down the cliff, no stars and stripes waving, no SOS sign carved into the foliage.

Maybe the crew hadn’t survived the crash.

She put that thought aside. They could have gotten out before the lander had plummeted over the cliff, even ejected on the way down. There were many possibilities. At the very least, there should be stuff she could use — tools, a first aid kit, maybe even a radio.

Messages from home.

What was for sure was that she was going to have to get up that cliff to find out. And she wasn’t going to make it up there alone.

There was an encampment of Hams, a squat hut of skin weighted down with stone, almost directly under the blue flash. She could see them moving around before the hut, slabs of muscle wrapped in crudely cut skins.

That was how she was going to get up that damn cliff.

She forced herself to slow. One step at a time, Emma; you know the protocol. It was going to be hard to be patient, to engage a new group of Hams once again. But that was what she was going to have to do.

She dropped her pack at the edge of the sea, and splashed her face with salt water. Then she walked up and down the beach, picking out bits of scattered driftwood. She found a long, straight branch, and selected a handful of thorny sticks. She took her favoured hand-axe and, with a skill born of long hours of practice and many cut fingers, she made notches in one end of the stick, wide enough to fit the thorny twigs. Then she took a bit of rawhide string from her pack, and wrapped it around the stick, lashing the barbs in place.

Thus, one harpoon.

She slipped off her boots and socks and coverall and waded into the shallows, harpoon raised.

Fishing had become her speciality. It didn’t seem to have occurred to any of the Ham communities here to figure out how to catch fish, either in the ocean or in freshwater streams. Fish meat, exotic but appealing, made a good bribe.

There was a ripple at her feet, a roughly diamond shape that emerged briefly from the sand. She stabbed down hard, feeling the crunch of breaking wood.

She found she had speared a skate, a big brown fleshy square of a fish, maybe two feet across. Skate buried themselves in the mud, coming up at night to hunt shellfish. Her catch was wriggling violently, and it was all she could do to hold on to the harpoon. With a grunting effort she heaved the skate over her head and out onto the sand, where it flopped, slowly dying. One bit of lingering squeamishness was a reluctance to kill anything; acknowledging the hypocrisy, she let her victims die instead.

She splashed out of the water. Briskly she inspected her harpoon, considering whether it was worth keeping; she had learned to conserve her energy and time, never throwing away anything that might be used again. But the barbs were broken. She stripped off the hide string and stuffed it back into her pack, and let the bits of the harpoon fall, abandoning this thing she had made that would have been beyond her imagining a few months ago, forgetting it as carelessly as any every-day-a-new-day Ham craftsman.

With her hand-axe she skinned and gutted the fish. You had to avoid the guts, and the skin could be coated by toxic mucus or dangerous spines: tricks she remembered from her childhood camping-in-the-woods days.

Then she pulled on her coverall and boots, picked up the skate meat and her pack, and walked steadily up the beach towards the Ham encampment.

These Hams accepted her silent presence in the corner of their hut, as readily as every other group she had encountered. They predictably turned away from her first offer of skate meat. But she continued to bring home gifts from the sea, until they had, one by one, experimentally, begun to taste the pale, sharp flesh.

So she settled into her corner of the communal hut, wrapping herself each night in grimy bits of parachute canvas, watching the Hams, waiting for some opportunity to find a way up the cliff to the lander.

She learned their names — Abel and Ruth and Saul and Mary — odd quasi-Biblical names, presumably bequeathed to them, like their fractured English, by some ancient contact with humans, Zealots or other “Skinny-folk’. She tried to follow their complex social interactions, much of it centring on speculative gossip about the vigorous child-woman Mary.

They were typical Hams. Come to that, all Hams were typical Hams.

Their English was broken — mispronounced, with missing or softened “G” and “K” and “th” sounds and vowels that blurred to sameness. The language had tenses past, future — and there were even conditionals, used for instance by gossiping women as they speculated what would follow if Mary gave herself to Saul, or if she fell for Abraham’s clumsy wooing first. But their language was elemental, with a simple vocabulary focusing on each other, their bodies, the hut.

As for Mary herself, she was clearly at the centre of a storm of hormonal change, relishing and fearing all the attention she got at the same time. But she never teased, Emma observed, never led any of the men on. Deceit seemed utterly unknown to these people. They were clever in many ways, but whatever they used those big brains for it wasn’t for lying to each other, as humans did.

All this dubious anthropological speculation served to occupy her mind. But it was all spectacularly useless when it came to bringing her closer to her central goal of reaching the big black and white moth suspended on the cliff over their heads, in which none of the Hams showed the slightest interest.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Manekato pushed into the forest. The foliage was dense, dark green, damp, cold, and it seemed to clutch at her face and limbs. The shadows stretched deep all around her, concealing subtle, elusive forms, as if wild creatures were Mapping themselves into and out of existence all around her.

Briefly she considered going back to the compound and seeking a new symmorph perhaps with better dark-adapting vision. But as she worked deeper into the wood her body moved increasingly easily, her feet and hands clutching at branches and roots, and a clear sense of direction worked with her powerful hearing to guide each footfall. She dismissed her fears; she even felt a certain deep exhilaration. We came from the forest, she thought, and it is to the forest that I now return.

She was seeking Without-Name, who had left the encampment of exiles.

Even before her final departure Without-Name had taken to spending increasingly long times away from the compound. After her challenge by Nemoto over the captured Zealot, she had not brought back further “specimens’, but at times Manekato thought she had glimpsed blood on her dirt-matted fur, and even on her lips.

To her surprise the little hominid Nemoto had expressed sympathy with Without Name. “Without-Name is out of control. But she is right. You are too slow, too cerebral. Mane. Perhaps your minds have grown over-ornate, and are strangled by their own complexity. It is time to confront the Old Ones, not to theorize over them…”

It had been deeply shocking for Manekato to hear such critical sentiments expressed by a mere lower hominid.

Still, Without-Name had become an increasing distraction, a wild blood-stained rogue planet crashing through the orderly solar system of purpose and knowledge acquisition which Manekato had sought to establish. Babo and others had expressed relief when Without-Name had finally failed to return from one of her ambiguous jaunts. But Manekato had sensed that Without-Name would cause them all severe and unwelcome problems yet.

Finally Manekato had been disturbed by a cacophony of cries, coming from deep in the nearby belt of forest. Something there had died, in great pain and anguish; and Manekato had had a powerful intuition that it was time for her to seek out Without-Name and meet her on her own terms.

And so here she was, just another hominid picking her way through the forest.

She emerged from the bank of trees. Beyond a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a low cliff rose: broken and eroded, perhaps limestone, pocked with hollows and low caves, overgrown with moss and struggling trees. Somewhere water trickled.

The sky was clouded over. The place was claustrophobic, enclosing. She could smell blood, and dread gathered in her heart.

A hominid walked out of one of the caves. To judge by the sewn skins he wore, he was a Zealot, like the specimen Without-Name had brought back to the camp. He carried a crossbow, and his tunic and leggings were splashed with dirt and blood. He saw Manekato, standing alone at the edge of the forest. His eyes widened. He dropped his bow and ran back into the cave. “Daemons! Strange Daemons!”

Manekato gathered her courage. She stepped forward, crossing the rock-strewn floor.

She paused in the cave’s entrance, giving her eyes time to adapt to this deeper dark. The cave’s roof was a layer of rock just above her head. It was worn smooth, as if by the touching of many fingers; perhaps this place had been inhabited for many generations. The cave stank of hominid, of crudely prepared food, of stale urine and faeces and sweat — and of blood.

A shadow moved before her. As it approached the light, it coalesced into the form of Without-Name. Her fur was splashed with blood, and a gouge had been cut into her arm.

“I suppose I have been expecting you,” she growled. “Are you aware what a target you provide, silhouetted against the light? We have not fought a war for a million years, Manekato; we have lost our instincts for survival.”

“What have you done, Renemenagota?” Manekato reached out and touched the wound in the other’s arm. It was a deep slice over the bicep, still leaking blood — it had not even been cleaned. “I see your victims did not submit quietly.”

Without-Name barked laughter. “It was glorious. Come.”

She turned and led the way deeper into the cave, and Manekato followed reluctantly.

At the back of the cave a lamp of what looked like burning animal fat flickered in a hollow on one wall; the rock above was streaked with black grease. By its light Manekato saw she was walking over scorched patches of dirt — hearths, perhaps, all cold and disused. Bits of stone and bone and wood were scattered everywhere. At the rear of the cave, animal skins had been stretched over rough frames of wood.

There were hominids here. They were Zealots, dressed in their characteristic garb of crudely sewn skin. When Manekato knuckle-walked towards them they yelled and grabbed their weapons.

Without-Name held up her hands. “She is weak. She will not harm you.”

The Zealots hurried out of her way, jabbering their alarm to each other.

Beyond the Zealots there was a mound of slumped forms.

They were hominids, all dead. They were the powerful squat creatures Nemoto called Hams. They had been slaughtered by crossbow bolts and spear thrusts. They had not died easily: ripped throats and gouged eyes and severed limbs testified to that, as did the injuries nursed by the Zealots. Blood soaked through the grisly heap, and spilled guts glistened on the floor beneath.

Without-Name’s eyes glittered. “You cannot engage these fellows hand-to-hand; the power of these stocky bodies is simply too great. But they work strictly short range. And so they fell to our bows and throwing spears as they tried to close with us, one after the other. Once they were down it was a case of moving in to finish them off. But they fought on even with their bellies torn open, their throats cut. Well, this was their home for uncounted generations — you can see that — they were fighting as we would for our Farms…”

Manekato discerned a smaller bundle, laid on top of the heap of corpses. It was an infant, its age impossible to tell, one leg bent back at an impossible angle. “Did this little one give you a good spectacle, Renemenagota?”

Without-Name shrugged. “The Zealots took most of the smaller infants back to their stockade. You can’t tame an adult Ham, you see; you have to get them young to break them. This one wouldn’t leave its mother’s side. The efforts to remove it resulted in a snapped leg.” She grinned, her teeth showing bright in the gloom. “Praisegod Michael was here. Their leader, you see; the leader of the Zealots. He uttered words over the corpses, blessing them, commending their souls to the afterlife he believes awaits us — or rather awaits his sort of hominid; he isn’t so sure about the rest of us. Michael said his prayers over this little creature and then cut its throat. A delicious contradiction, don’t you think?

“You should see the ambition that burns in Michael’s eyes’. He dreams of cleansing his world of such creatures of the Devil as this — what an ambition! but he has lacked the understanding to make it so. He was wary of me when I approached him — no, contemptuous, because for him I am less than human. But I forced him to listen to me. I made him see that by taking his captives and training them properly, he increases his resources, you see, which he can deploy for further conquest; once initiated, it is a simple exponential growth.”

“You spoke to this monster — you are working with him?” Manekato said tightly, “Whoever this Praisegod is, his reasons for wishing to destroy the Hams and the others have surely more to do with the flaws in his own heart than any ideological justification.”

Without-Name grabbed her arm and held it tight; Manekato felt moisture, blood and sweat, soaking into her fur. “Of course Praisegod Michael is mad. But it is a glorious madness.”

Manekato prised her arm away from Without-Name’s grip. Regretfully she said, “Glorious or not, I have to stop you.”

Without-Name laughed. “You do not have the imagination or the courage for that, Manekato.”

The Zealots were returning to the pile of Ham corpses. They were cutting away ears and hands, perhaps as trophies. But their movements were characteristically sluggish, like pale worms moving in the dark.

Joshua:

Joshua lay on the filth-crusted floor of his cell.

He was left alone for days. It was worse than any beating. There was nobody to look at him.

The People of the Grey Earth were never alone by choice. They spent their entire lives in their tight-knit communities, surrounded day and night by the same faces, change coming only through the slow tide of birth and death. Some women spent their entire lives within a hundred paces of where they were born. Even parties of hunters who ranged farther in search of big game would not mix with other groups of hominids, even other Hams; strangers were like faces in a dream, remote, not real.

He tried to picture the hut, the people coming and going about their business. He tried to recall the faces of Abel and Saul and Mary and Ruth and the others. The life of the people was going on, even though he was not there to be looked at — just as it had continued after the death of Jacob, the endless round of days and nights, of eating and sleeping and fornicating, of birth and love and death.

Jacob was dead. Was Joshua dead?

Away from others, Joshua was not even fully conscious. As the light came and went, he felt himself crumble. He was the walls, the filthy floor, the patch of daylight in the roof.

…And yet he was not alone, for there were people in the walls.

Faint marks had been scratched there, perhaps by fingernails, or with bits of stone. Some of them were so ancient they were crusted with dirt, and could be detected only by the touch of his fingertips. Perhaps they were made by Skinny or Nutcracker-man or Elf or Runner. But not by Ham, for no Ham made marks like these.

Scratches on the wall. Patterns that pulled at his consciousness. Boxes and circles and lines that longed to speak to him.

He was in a cave. But it was not a cave, for its walls were made of rocks piled one on top of the other. Sometimes the people would build walls, lines of rubble loosely piled, to help keep out the small animals that foraged at night. Joshua knew what a wall was. But these walls went up, high above Joshua’s head, too high for him to reach.

And there was a roof made of rocks too, suspended over his head. On first waking here, he had cringed, thinking a sky full of rocks was descending on him. But the roof did not fall. He learned to uncurl, even to stand — though each time he woke from sleep he forgot about the roof, and whimpered in terror and curled in a corner of the cell.

The only light here came from a hole in the roof. He saw the days come and go through that hole, night succeeding day. He would lie on his back staring at the little circle of light. But when it rained, the water would pour through the hole, and he would huddle in a corner, shivering.

Sometimes a face would appear in the hole, the face of a Skinny. Stuff would be thrown down at him. Sometimes it would be food that he would scrabble to collect from the floor. The food was poor, scraps of cut-up vegetable or fruit peel or bits of gristle, some of it already chewed, sour with the saliva of Skinnies. But he devoured it all, for he was constantly hungry.

Sometimes they would hurl down water at him, usually brackish and stinking, enough to drench him. It would drain away out of a hole in the centre of the blackened, worn floor, taking much of his own shit and piss with it. When the water came he would stand with his mouth and hands open, catching as much as he could. And when it had finished he would scrape at the filth-blackened floor with his fingers, collecting as much of the water as he could, even lick the floor with his tongue.

But sometimes all the Skinnies would throw down was their own thin shit, or they would piss in the hole, trying to hit him as he scurried from side to side.

His memories of how he had come here were blurred.

He remembered the clearing. After Mary had escaped he had been picked up by many Skinnies, all grunting with the effort. With every jolt his shoulder had blazed with pain. They had thrown him onto a platform made of strips of cut-up wood. And then the platform had been dragged away, along broad trails burned into the woods.

He remembered entering the stockade. It was a great wall of sharpened tree trunks driven into the ground, many times higher than Joshua could have reached. Inside there were huts of sod and wood, dark hovels whose stink had struck him as he was dragged past. There were many animals, goats and rabbits and ducks. There were many, many Skinnies, with grimy skin and brown teeth.

And there were Hams. They dragged at ropes and pushed bits of wood and dug at the ground. Joshua had hooted to the Hams, seeking help. Though the Hams were few, they could surely overpower these Skinny folk easily. But they had not responded, not even looked up, and he had been silenced by a slamming blow to his mouth.

They had removed his skins, and he was naked. And he had been thrown into this darkened cell.

The punishment had started immediately.

There had been Skinnies around him. Some of them were grinning. One of them carried a stick whose tip glowed bright red. Joshua stared at the glowing stick; it was one of the most beautiful colours he had ever seen. For one brief instant he left his aching body, and was the fiery glow.

But then the Skinnies shoved him on his back, trapping his limbs. The man with the glowing stick held it before Joshua’s face — he could feel heat, like a fire — the man rammed it into the wound in his shoulder.

Only fragments after that, dark red fragments soaked with pain. Fragments, fading into dark.

But Joshua welcomed the presence of those who beat him. For at least, then, he was not alone.

One day he saw faces in the scratches on the wall. Faces that peered out at him, the faces of Skinnies.

No, not faces: one face, over and over.

The face of a man, thin, bearded, a circle over his head. The man looked at him, but did not look at him. Sometimes Joshua yelled at him, punched the face. But the wall would return, scraping his knuckles, and the man, not replying, would disappear into his web of scratches.

Joshua was dead. He was in a hole in the ground, like Jacob. But there were no worms here. There were only the faces, looking at him, not looking at him.

He screamed. He cowered in the corner, as he did when his captors pissed on him.

That was how the Skinnies found him one day, when they burst into his cell with their clubs and rocks and whips. They mocked him, kicking at his back and kidneys, and they pulled him out of the corner and stretched him.

A leering face hovered over him. “We’ll break you yet, boy, while there’s still some work left in that hulking body of yours.” He arched his back, trying to see the man in the wall.

There was laughter. “He’s looking for Jesus.”

Running footsteps. A boot launched at his face. He felt a tooth smash at the back of his mouth.

“Help!” he cried. “Help me, Cheesus!”

The gaolers staggered back, open-mouthed, staring.

A day and a night. His tooth was a pit of pain.

Skinnies were in the cell. Joshua scuttled to his corner, expecting the usual blows.

But a net was thrown over him. He did not resist. His hands and arms and feet and legs were tightly bound, and then his legs folded behind his back and tied up to his waist.

Wrapped in the net, he was dragged out of his cell.

Outside was a long, narrow cavern. There was no daylight, but fires burned in pits on the wall. He saw only the floor and walls, the lumping shadows of his gaolers as they dragged him, letting his bruised limbs and head rattle on the floor.

They paused, and there was a clanking, clattering noise. Joshua lifted his head dully.

He was facing an open cell. A man sat in the cell, a Skinny. But this was a Skinny like none Joshua had ever seen. He had no hair on the top of his head, none at all, although stubble clustered on his cheek. And his clothing, though filthy, blood-stained and torn, was not like the skin the Zealots wore. It was blue: a blue membrane, like the wings of the sky seed.

Joshua, electrified, gasped with recognition.

The man was looking at him. “My name is Reid Malenfant,” he said gently. “If you get out of here, remember that. Malenfant.”

Joshua worked his mouth; it was crusted with blood and his lips were cracked. “Mal’fan’.”

Malenfant nodded. “Good luck to you, friend.”

And then the door was slammed.

Shadow:

She stayed away from the others. She slept in nests at the periphery of the crater-wall forest, and fed from trees and shrubs far from the movements of the rest of the group.

She searched for cobbles in streams and on the exposed, eroded crater walls.

She had not grown old enough to acquire more than the most basic tool-making skills. So it took her many tries, chipping at cobbles with stones and bits of bone, before she had manufactured something that felt right. It was a lens shaped cobble, with one crudely sharpened edge, that fit neatly in her hand.

Through these days her determination burned, clear and unwavering.

Burned until she was ready.

Joshua:

Joshua was in a new place. The walls were white, like snow. The floor shone, smooth as a bamboo trunk.

Joshua stood naked at the cell’s centre. Heavy ropes bound his hands before him and his feet, and the ropes were fixed to a great bar dug out of the rock floor beneath him. There were big holes in the walls covered by palm fronds, and through them Joshua could see daylight. He sniffed deeply, but his cavernous nostrils were clogged with snot and blood.

There were people in the walls.

The marks on these walls were not mere scratches. They were vivid images in bright blood-red and night-black, and in them Joshua saw the thin, bearded man. The man was much clearer here than in the deep cell — so clear he never went away — and there were many of him, shining brightly, even one version of him fixed to a tree trunk and bleeding.

Joshua cowered.

“Well might you avert your eyes from the Lord’s countenance.”

Joshua turned. A man had spoken. A Skinny. He was taller than Joshua, his hair grey, and his black clothing swept to the ground. His black robes were skin, finely worked, black like charcoal from a hearth.

Joshua cringed. But no blow came. There was only a hand on his forehead, light, almost curious, exploring his brow ridges.

“Well might you hide your face for shame of what you are. And yet you called out for the Lord’s help — so the brutes assigned to break you assured me… Stand up, boy.” Joshua received a hard toe cap to the side of his leg. “Up, Ham.”

Reluctantly Joshua stood.

The man had a sharp nose, and warts on his face, and eyes such a pale blue they made Joshua think of the sky. He walked around Joshua, and touched his chest and back. His hands were very soft. “I did ask for you to be cleaned up,” he said absently. “Well. You may call me Praisegod Michael. Do you understand? I am Praisegod Michael. Praisegod.”

“Prai’go’.”

“Praisegod Michael, yes.” Praisegod peered into his eyes. “What brows, what a countenance… And you, do you give yourself a name?” When Joshua didn’t reply, Praisegod pointed to his own chest. “Praisegod Michael.” And he pointed to Joshua.

Joshua spoke his name. When he moved his mouth his smashed tooth hurt; he could feel pulp leak into his mouth.

Praisegod laughed. “Joshua. My fathers named your fathers, when they found themselves sharing this Purgatorial place with you… And now you pass on the names one to the other, down through the generations, like heirlooms in the hands of apes. Very well, Joshua. And what are you?”

The man’s thin face, with its flat brow and high, bulging forehead, terrified Joshua. He had no idea what Praisegod wanted.

Praisegod produced a short, thick whip. With practised motions he lashed at Joshua’s shoulder. The pain was great, for that was the site of Joshua’s spear wound. But the skin was not broken.

“If you do not answer, you will be treated so,” Praisegod said evenly. “But let me answer for you. You have a man’s name, but you are not a man. You are a Ham. That is another name my father gave yours, and it is appropriate. Do you know who Ham was?”

A failure to reply brought a fresh lash of the whip.

“Ham, father of Canaan, son of Noah. He failed to respect his father. Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. Genesis 9,2-5. A servant of servants, yes; that is your place, boy. But then you know nothing of Noah, do you? You are an animal — a magnificent one, perhaps, and yet an animal even so. From your misshapen head to your splayed feet you signify antediluvian stock — if not pre-Adamite, indeed.” Praisegod seemed to be growing angry. Joshua watched him dully. “The world was cleansed of your kind by the waters of the Flood. But you survive beyond your time in this dismal pit. And now you call on the Lord Himself—”

Another lash to the shoulders, and Joshua flinched. Then a blow to the back of the legs forced Joshua to his knees.

Praisegod Michael grabbed Joshua by his hair, making him raise his head. “Look on His merciful face. What can you know of His benison? Do you know what my fathers suffered to bring the Word to this world? When they fell here, they had nothing: nothing but the clothes they wore. They were set upon by beasts like yourself; they starved; they fell prey to diseases. And yet they survived, and built this community, all by the strength of their hands, and their faith.

“And in all this they remembered the Word. They had no Book with them, not a single copy. But they remembered. They would sit around their fires and recite the verses, one after another, seeking to recall it for their children, for they knew they had no way home.

“And that is how the Word of the Lord came to this pit. And now you, an animal of the field, with your thunderbolts of stone, you presume to call on Him for help?…”

Joshua folded over himself, letting the whip fall. He felt his flesh break, and the whip dug deeper into the wounds it had made.

Shadow:

The fungal growth now framed her vision, black as night.

When she heard the roosting calls of the people, she slid through the trees. The people nested, silhouetted high against a cloud-laced earth-blue sky. She recognized One-eye by the grunting snores he made, the stink of a body she had come to know too well.

She slipped up the trunk of the tree, her long hands and feet gripping. With scarcely a rustle, she clung to branches above One-eye’s rough nest.

He lay on his back, hands wide, legs splayed, one foot dangling over the edge of his nest. His mouth was open, and a thin stream of drool slid down his chin. He had an erection, dark in the Earthlight.

She clung to the branches with her feet and legs, and hung upside down over him. She took his penis in her mouth and sucked it gently, rubbing the shaft with her lips. In his sleep, he moaned.

Then she bit down, as savagely as she could.

He screamed and thrashed. She could hear answering hoots from surrounding nests.

She flung herself down on him. His eyes were wide and staring, and she thought she could smell blood on his breath. He was stronger than she was, but he was already in intense agony, and she had the advantage of surprise. He pushed feebly at her face with one hand. She grabbed the hand, pulled a finger into her mouth, and nipped off a joint with a single savage bite. He howled again, and she spat the bloody joint into his open mouth, making him gag.

Then she raised her shaped cobble and slammed it against the side of his head.

Joshua:

A day and a night, here in this white place, without food or water.

Men scrubbed him roughly. They mopped away the blood and shit from the floor.

Praisegod was prone to swings of mood, which Joshua neither understood nor could predict. Sometimes there was coldness, cruelty, heatings. But sometimes Praisegod would gaze at him with bright eyes, and run his hands over his battered body, as a mother might stroke a child. Joshua quickly learned to dread such moments, for they always finished in the most savage heatings of all.

And yet he longed for Praisegod Michael to stay, rather than leave him alone.

He lay on his side, staring at the marks on the walls — not the face of Cheesus, but strange angular lines, the loops and whorls. Bewildered by pain and exhaustion, he stared and stared, trying to lose himself in the lines, trying to see the faces there.

“What is it you see, boy? Can you read? Can you read the Lord’s words? Do you hear what they tell you?” Showing his sporadic, chilling tenderness, Praisegod Michael was kneeling on the floor, with Joshua’s head on his lap.

His mouth dry, his tongue thick, Joshua whispered, “People.”

“People?” Praisegod Michael stared at the marks. “These are words, and these are pictures. The words speak to us… Ah, but they do not, do they? Marks on the wall do not speak. They are symbols, of the sounds we make when we speak, which are themselves symbols of the thoughts we concoct… Is that what you mean?” His hands explored Joshua’s body with a rough eagerness. “What lies inside that cavernous head of yours? The words you utter are themselves symbolic — but your kind have no books, no art. Is that why you cannot understand? Would you like me to tell you what those letters say to me?” He pointed at the wall. “After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in Heaven. Revelation 4,1.”

“Heav’n,” Joshua mumbled.

“The sky, child, where we will pass when we die.”

Joshua twisted his head to see Praisegod’s face. “Dead.”

“No.” Praisegod was almost crooning, and he rocked Joshua back and forth. “No, you poor innocent. You are alive. And when you die, you will be alive again in Christ — if His mercy extends to your kind…”

“Dead,” said Joshua. “Dead. Gone. Like Jacob.”

“Dead but not gone! The corpse in the ground is the seed that is planted in the earth. So we will all bloom in the spring of the Lord. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. But I am talking in symbols again, ain’t I? A man is not a seed. But a man is like a seed.”

Suddenly he pushed Joshua away. The Ham’s head clattered on the floor, jarring his aching tooth.

“You can know nothing of what I speak, for your head is empty of symbols… Ah, but what if my religion is nothing but symbols — is that what you are thinking? — the symbol of the seed, the Mother and Child — a dream concocted by words rattling in my empty head?” Now Joshua felt kicks, hard, frantic, aimed at his back and buttocks. “0 you witness to the Flood, 0 you underman! See how you have planted doubts in my mind! How clever you are, how cunning! You and that Daemon of the forest, Renemenagota, she of the ape build and mocking, wise eyes… The Daemons make me promises. They can take my vision and make it real, make this antediluvian island a godly place. So they say. So she says. Ah, but in her dark eyes I sense mockery, Joshua! Do you know her? Did she send you?… How you madden me! Are you agents of Satan, sent to confuse me with your whispers of God’s work?…”

But now Praisegod leaned over Joshua again and grabbed his face. Joshua saw how his eyes were red and brimming with tears, his face swollen as if by weeping. “Can sin exist here? The brutes who serve me have their Runner women, their whores with the bodies of angels and the heads of apes. I, I am not of that kind… But now, here! Here!” He grabbed Joshua’s bound hands and pushed them into his crotch; Joshua could feel a skinny erection. “You are destroying me!”

And the beatings went on.

Joshua lay on the floor, his own blood sticky under his face. Pieces moved around in his head, just as they had before: when he saw the sky seed fall from the sky, when he put together the cobble from the bits of shattered stone.

The kind Skinny’s face peered through a cloud of pain and black-edged exhaustion.

He whispered, “Fore me was door standin” open Heaven.”

Praisegod Michael was here. Panting, he gazed into Joshua’s eyes. “What did you say?”

But Joshua was, for now, immersed in his own head, where the pieces were orbiting one another, the flakes sticking to the core of the cobble one by one. The Grey Earth. The seed that fell from the air. The door in the sky.

Joshua was, in his way, a genius. Certainly none of his kind had experienced such a revelation before.

“Heav’n,” he said at last.

Praisegod Michael pushed his ear close to his mouth to hear.

“Heav’n is th” Grey Earth. Th” seed. Th” seed takes th” people. Th” people pass through th” door. Door to heaven. To Grey Earth.”

“By God’s eyes.” Praisegod Michael stumbled back. “Is it possible you believe?”

Joshua tried to raise his head. “Believe,” he said, for he did, suddenly, deeply and truly. “Th” door in th” sky. Th” Grey Earth.”

Praisegod Michael stalked around the cell, muttering. “I have never heard an ape-thing like yourself utter such words. Is it possible you have faith? And if so, must you therefore have a soul?” Again he stroked the heavy ridges over Joshua’s eyes, and he pressed his gaunt body close to the Ham’s. “You intrigue me. You madden me. I love you. I despise you.” He leaned closer to the Ham, and kissed him full on the lips. Joshua tasted sourness, a rank staleness.

“Graah—” Praisegod rolled away, lying sprawled on the floor, and vomited, so that thin bile spread across the shining floor.

Then he stood, trembling, striving for composure. “I would kill you. But if you have the soul of a man — I will not risk damnation for you — if you have not damned me already!” He smiled, suddenly cold, still. “I will send you out. You will spread the Word to your kind. You will be a Saul of the apes.” He raised his pale eyes to the light from the window. “A mission, yes, with you as my acolyte — you, a pre-Adamite man-ape.”

Joshua stared at him, understanding nothing, thinking of a door in the sky.

But now Praisegod stood over him again, and again he spoke tenderly. “I will help you.” He reached into his clothing and produced a knife. It was not of stone; it glittered like ice, though Joshua could see how worn and scuffed it was. “No beast should speak the Word of God. Here.” He put his fingers inside Joshua’s mouth. The fingers tasted of burning. He pushed down, until Joshua’s mighty jaw dropped.

Then, without warning, he grabbed Joshua’s tongue and dragged it out of his mouth. Joshua felt the slash, a stab of pain.

Blood sprayed over Praisegod Michael.

Shadow:

The next morning the women surrounded Silverneck, as usual. With their infants clambering over them, they munched on figs.

With a crash, One-eye fell from his tree. His hands and feet left a smear of blood where they touched bark or leaves, for several of his fingers and toes had been nipped off. White bone showed in a huge deep wound on the side of his head. And his penis was almost severed, dangling by a thread of skin. His fur was matted by blood and piss and panic shit.

The women stared.

He looked about vaguely, as if blinded, and he mewled like an infant. Then he stumbled away, alone, into the deeper forest.

Shadow walked out of the tree cover.

Silverneck moved aside for her. One of the younger women growled, but Shadow punched her in the side of the head, so hard she was knocked sideways. Shadow sat with the group, and clawed figs into her mouth. But nobody looked at her, nobody groomed her, and even the children avoided her.

That night, when the roosting calls went out. One-eye did not return.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant was kept chained up in a dark, filthy cell. It was just a brick-lined pit, its damp mud floor lined with packed-down filth. The only light came from a grilled window high in the ceiling. The door was heavy with a massive wooden bolt on the outside.

He reached out to touch the walls. The bricks were rotten. Maybe he could dig out handholds and climb up to that window.

And then what? What then, after you climb out into the middle of Praisegod’s courtyard?…

You are not dealing with rational people, Malenfant.

It was true Praisegod had built a place of relative order here. But this was an island of rigidity in a world of fluidity and madness, a world where mind itself was at a premium, a world where the very stars regularly swam around the sky, for all Praisegod’s zeal and discipline — just as, Malenfant suspected, Praisegod’s own inner core of horror constantly threatened to break through his surface of control.

There was nothing he could do, nothing to occupy his mind.

Sometimes the most courageous thing was doing nothing. Do-nothing heroics: was that a phrase from Conrad? If there was really, truly no way you could change your situation, the last thing you wanted to do was to pour so much energy into fighting your fear that you burned yourself up before the chance came for a break.

As he sat in the dark and the filth, utterly alone, Malenfant wondered how long his own do-nothing heroics would sustain him.

At last he was brought before Praisegod Michael.

At Praisegod’s chapel-residence Malenfant was kept waiting, standing before Praisegod’s empty desk bound hand and foot, for maybe an hour.

Finally Praisegod walked in, slowly, contemplative, his Ham boy at his side. Praisegod didn’t look at Malenfant. He sat at his desk, and a Ham girl brought in a tray of chopped fish set on slabs of hard, dark bread, with a bowl of what looked like mustard and a wooden goblet of wine. Praisegod ate a little of the fish, dipping it in the mustard, and then he passed the rest to the Ham boy, who sat on the floor and ate ravenously.

Praisegod’s manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, “I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why — you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mould of iniquity. But you — you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals.”

“Don’t count on it,” Malenfant said.

Praisegod’s eyes narrowed. “You should not presume on God’s grace.”

“This place has nothing to do with God,” Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. “You play with human lives, but you don’t even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place — this Moon — is an artefact. Not made by God. Humans. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities, is because of that moving. Because of people. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it.”

Praisegod closed his eyes. “This is a time of confusion. Of change… I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God’s. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out.” He nodded to Sprigge. “A hundred stripes to start with.”

Malenfant was dragged out of the room. “You’re a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?”

But Praisegod wasn’t listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.

Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.

He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant’s arms above his head until his joints ached.

Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. “I have to make it hard,” he said. “It’ll be the worse for me if I spare you.”

“Just do your job,” Malenfant said sourly.

“I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he’ll ill use you, Malenfant. I’ve seen that before too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I’ll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he’ll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots.”

Malenfant tried to lift his head. “I don’t have any boots.”

“Boots will be provided.”

A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge’s face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion — compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. “Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He’s a madman.”

Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. “Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don’t first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we’d all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We’re housed and we’re fed and nobody harms us. And now that he’s taken up with the Daemons well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that.”

Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.

“Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler. Sir Malenfant. I know how you’ll bear it. But you’ll live; remember that.” He stepped away, into the dark.

Malenfant heard running footsteps.

And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.

More of Sprigge’s “stripes” rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant’s head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.

He didn’t try to keep from crying out.

Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred were done.

At last he was hit by a rush of water — it felt ice-cold — and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.

Sprigge appeared before him. “The salty back,” he said, cutting Malenfant’s wrists free. “It’ll help you heal.”

Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.

A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.

But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham — perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed — the wounds stung with every drop — and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.

The square window in the ceiling above showed diffuse grey-blue. It was evening, or very early morning.

He was left alone after that, and he slept, falling into a deeper slumber.

When he woke again that square of sky was bright blue. By its light he saw that the leaves on his back were from a banana tree. His pain seemed soothed.

“…Malenfant. Malenfant, are you there?”

The voice was just a whisper, coming from the direction of the door.

Malenfant got his hands under his chest, pushed himself up to a crawling position. He felt the leaves fall away from his back. His bare chest was sticky with his own dried blood, and with every move he felt scabs crack, wounds ache.

He crawled to the wall by the door, kneeling there in the mud and blood.

“McCann?”

“Malenfant! By God it’s good to hear the voice of a civilized man. Have they hurt you?”

Malenfant grimaced. “A ‘feeler,’ Sprigge called it.”

“It could get worse, Malenfant.”

“I know that.”

McCann’s voice sounded odd — thick, indistinct, as if he were talking around something in his mouth. Flogging, branding, tongue-boring, Malenfant recalled. The penalty for blasphemy.

“What have they done to you, Hugh?”

“My punishment was enthusiastically delivered,” McCann lisped.

“One must admire their godly zeal… And the beatings are not the half of it. Malenfant, he has me labouring in the fields: pulling ploughs, along with the Runner slaves. It is not the physical trial — I can barely add an ounce to the mighty power of my Runner companions — but the indignity, you see. Praisegod has made me one with the sub-men, and his brutish serfs mock me as I toil.”

“You can stand a little mockery.”

“Would that were true! Praisegod understands how to hurt beyond the crude infliction of blows and cuts and burns; and the shame of this casting-down has hurt me grievously — and he knows it. But his punishment will not last long, Malenfant. I am not so young nor as fit as I was; soon, I think, I will evade Praisegod’s monstrous clutches once and for all… But it need not be so for you. Malenfant, I think Praisegod has some sympathy for you — or purpose, at least. Tell him whatever it is you think he wants to hear. That way you will be spared his wrath.”

Malenfant said softly, “You were the one who said you could do business with him.”

“Do as I say, not as I do,” McCann hissed. “It is my faith, Malenfant, my faith. Praisegod arouses in me a righteous rage which I cannot contain, whatever the cost to myself. But he is an intelligent man, a cunning man. I suspect his grasp of his ugly crew here was slipping. I have heard the men mutter. They tell fortunes, you know, with cowry shells — much handled, shining like old ivory… Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion. He was on his uppers, Malenfant, until quite recently. But now his inchoate ambitions have found a new clarity, a plausibility. He has found new allies: these Daemons, whoever or whatever they are. He has suddenly become a much more credible, and dangerous, figure… If I had half a brain I would stay in his fold.

“But you are different, Malenfant. Without faith — a paradoxically enviable condition! — you have no moral foundation to inhibit you; you must lie and cheat and steal; you must kowtow to Praisegod; you must do everything you can, everything you must, to survive.”

“I’ll try,” Malenfant gasped.

“Will you, my friend? Will you truly? There is a darkness in you, Malenfant. I saw it from the beginning. You may choose, without knowing it, to use Praisegod as the final instrument of your own destruction.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You must look into your heart, Malenfant. Think about the logic of your life… The day advances. Soon I will be called to my work in the fields, and I must sleep if I can.”

“Take care of yourself, Hugh.”

“Yes… God be with you, my friend.”

That night Malenfant called McCann’s name. The only reply was a kind of gasping, inarticulate, and a moist slithering.

The night after that Malenfant called for McCann, over and over, but there was no reply.

Emma Stoney:

She had first become aware of Joshua as an absence. There was a spare place at the hearths of Ruth and others, portions of meat left set aside by the hunters. It was a pattern she had noticed before when somebody had recently died; the Hams clearly remembered their dead, and they made these subtle tributes of absence — halfway to a ritual, she supposed.

Then, one day, Joshua came back.

Within a couple of days it was clear Joshua was not like the other Hams.

He was perhaps twenty-five years old, as much as she was any judge of the ages of these people. His body bore the marks of savage heatings, and his tongue seemed to be damaged, making his speech even more impenetrable than the rest.

No Hams lived alone. But Joshua lived alone, in his cave beyond the communal space around the hut. Hams did not go naked — but Joshua did, wearing not so much as a scrap of skin to cover his filth-encrusted genitals. Hams cut their hair and, crudely, shaved their beards with stone knives. Joshua did not, and his hair was a mane of black streaked with grey, his beard long but rather comically wispy under that huge jaw. Hams joined in the activities of the community, making tools, gathering and preparing food, repairing clothes and the hut. Joshua did none of this.

Hams did not make markings, or symbols of any kind — in fact they showed loathing of such things. Joshua covered the walls of his cave with markings made by stone scrapers and bits of bone. They might have been faces; he sketched rough ovals and rectangles, criss-crossed by interior lines — noses, mouths? over and over. The marks were crude scratches, as if made by a small child — but still, they were more than she had ever observed any other Ham to make.

The other Hams tolerated him. In fact, since he did no gathering or hunting, by providing him with food they were keeping him alive, as she had seen other groups sustain badly injured, sickly or elderly individuals. Perhaps they thought he was ill, beyond his body’s slowly healing wounds.

Certainly, by the standards of his kind, he was surely insane. Studying this Ham hermit from afar, Emma concluded that whatever his story, she had best avoid him.

But when Joshua spotted her, the matter was taken out of her hands.

She was walking up the beach from the sea. Her catch of fish had been good that day, and she had used a scrap of blue “chute cloth from her pack to carry it all.

Joshua was sitting outside his cave, muttering to himself. When he saw her blue cloth, he got to his feet, hooted loudly, and came running.

Other Hams, close to the hut, watched dully.

Joshua capered before her, muttering, his accent thicker than any she had heard before. He was gaunt, and his back was still red with half-healed welts. But he might have been three times her weight.

Emma reached for the stone knife she kept tucked in her belt. “Keep back, now.”

He grabbed the blue cloth, spilling the fish on the sand. He sniffed the cloth with his giant, snot-crusted nostrils, and wiped it over his face. “This,” he shouted. “This!”

She frowned. “What is it? What are you trying to tell me?”

“Th” door in the sky,” he said. “Th” door in Heaven. Th” wings of th” seed.” His voice was horribly indistinct — and when he opened his mouth to yell these things at her, she saw a great notch had been cut out of his tongue.

She should get out of here, flee to the sanctuary of the hut, get away from his deranged grasp. But she stayed. For no other Ham had used phrases like “the door in the sky’.

She asked cautiously, “What door?”

“Th” sky seed. Th” Grey Earth. Th” seed fell th” sky.”

She understood it in a flash. She whirled and pointed to the lander, stranded on the cliff face. “Is that what you’re talking about? The lander — the thing that fell from the sky?” She grabbed back the bit of cloth. “Under a parachute. A blue “chute, wings, like this.”

For answer he bellowed, “Sky seed!” And he turned away and ran full tilt towards the foot of the cliff, beneath the lander.

Emma watched him go, her heart thumping.

She could stay here her whole life and never persuade the Hams to help her get to the lander. Maybe it took an insane Ham even to conceive of such a project. A Ham like Joshua.

Now or never, Emma.

She grabbed her pack and ran after Joshua.

There was a trail, of sorts, that led from the beach to the top of the cliff. At least Joshua showed her the way; she couldn’t have managed at all otherwise. But it was a trail for Hams — or maybe goats — certainly not for humans. The scrambling and climbing was a major challenge for Emma, never super-fit, never any kind of climber. Nevertheless, by sheer force of will, she kept up.

At the top of the cliff she fell back, exhausted, her heart pumping and her lungs scratching for air. It was like her first few days after the portal, when she had struggled to acclimatize to this strange mountain-top world.

Joshua immediately plunged into the cliff-top forest. Emma forced herself to her feet and followed.

Joshua crashed through the dense forest by main force, pushing aside branches, saplings and even some mature trees. He seemed careless of the noise he made and the trail he left behind — again unlike most Hams, who took care to pass silently through the dangerous twilight of the forest.

At last they pushed into a clearing. Here the trees had been battered flat, she saw, and bits of blue cloth clung to scattered branches. Her heart thumped harder. Joshua ran across the clearing to the far side, where a last line of trees had been broken down, exposing blue-grey sky. She followed him.

She found herself at the lip of the cliff, looking down on a trail of scraped rock and bits of cloth and “chute cord. And there, really not so far beneath the lip of the cliff, like a fat bug trapped in some huge spider-web, lay the lander.

Joshua squatted on his haunches and pointed down at the lander. “Sky seed,” he said excitedly. “Sky seed!”

She gazed hungrily down at the lander: crumpled, battered, stained and weathered, but intact. She saw no sign that anybody had climbed out of it since its plummet down the cliff.

From here the lander looked very small. Specifically, she couldn’t see any sign of an engine pack, no way the thing could get itself off the ground and back to Earth.

She sat back, forcing herself to think. Sitting here with a Neandertal the internal politics of America seemed a remote abstraction — but still she couldn’t believe that the US government would sanction any kind of one-way mission, even for someone as persuasive as Reid Malenfant. But that meant — she thought, her brain working feverishly — that the engine had to be somewhere else.

She grabbed Joshua’s arms, and immediately regretted it; his skin was covered in filth and scabs. He flinched back from her touch, as if she intended to hurt him. She let go, and held her empty hands up before him. “I’m sorry… Listen to me. There must be another lander. I mean, another sky seed. A second one.” But Hams did not count. She held her hands up to mime two landers coming down from the west, one after the other. But Hams did not use symbols.

She pointed, bluntly. “Sky seed. Down there. Sky seed.” She pointed into the forest, at random. “Over there.”

He frowned. He pointed west, deeper into the forest. “Ov” there.”

She took a deep breath. I knew it.

But now Joshua was jabbering, pointing at the lander and the sky. “Sky seed. Praisegod. There “fore me was door standin” open Heav’n. Sky seed in Heav’n. People of th” Grey Earth. People of Heav’n.” And on and on, a long, complex, baffling diatribe.

She peered into his ridged eye sockets, struggling to understand what was going through that mind — so alien from hers, and damaged too.

Bit by bit she got it.

Joshua had seen the lander come down from the sky. He had seen the second lander too. She knew that Hams believed their people came from a place in the sky, which they called the Grey Earth. Joshua, alternately, called it Heaven. As best she could make out he wanted to use the lander to take his people home, to Grey Earth, to Heaven.

“Was it the Zealots who taught you about Heaven? Did the Zealots hurt you? Did this Praisegod hurt you?”

“Prai’go” Michael,” he mumbled. “Mal’fan’.”

Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She grabbed his shoulders, mindless of the filth, resisting his flinching. “What did you say?”

“Mal’fan’. Zealots. Mal’fan’.”

The Zealots had Malenfant. Malenfant was here.

She sat back on her haunches, breathing in gasps. “Do you know where Malenfant is being held? — no, you can’t tell me that. But you could show me.” She studied Joshua, who gazed back at her. “Listen to me. There is something you want. There is something I want. This is what we will do. You take me to Malenfant… If you do this, I will give you the lander. It will take you home, to Heaven, to the Grey Earth.”

It took a long time to make him understand all of this. It might have been the first time in the history of these Hams, she thought, that anybody had tried to strike a bargain.

And, as she had absolutely no intention of using the lander for anything else but getting herself and Malenfant out of here, it might have been the first time anybody had told a Ham a lie.

Reid Malenfant:

Uncounted days after his whipping, Malenfant was again dragged before Praisegod Michael.

Malenfant stood as straight as he could, his arms tied behind his back, a new skin jacket over his upper body. He seethed with resentment at his own pain and humiliation, anger at what he suspected had become of McCann, and a kind of self-righteous disgust at Praisegod.

Get a hold of yourself, Malenfant. Do business, remember.

“What now, Praisegod? Another beating?”

Praisegod walked around Malenfant. Malenfant saw how his right leg spasmed, as if he wished to flee; he seemed unusually agitated. Praisegod Michael was a man of depths, all of them murky.

Praisegod’s Ham boy sat on the edge of the desk, staring at Malenfant.

“I do not wish to punish you, Sir Malenfant. I can tell you have twice the mentation of Sprigge, here. I would rather obtain your support.”

“You know nothing about me.”

Praisegod said, “Where we came from does not matter, Malenfant. For we cannot escape this place; men have spent their lives to prove that. And as your friend McCann understood, what unites men, in this world of animals, is greater than that which separates us. All that matters is that we are here, now, and we must make the best of it. Though it has the face of a work of Satan, this island is a world made by God — of course it is; to argue otherwise would be to support the heresy of Manichaeus. Therefore it is perfectible, and therefore there is good work to be done here by righteous men… There is much to be done here.”

Malenfant eyed him. Praisegod was a shithead, yes. He wasn’t about to conquer the Red Moon. But a shithead like this could cause a lot of suffering to a lot of people, and near-people. “Perfectible? Right. I know your kind. You intend to build an empire, Praisegod. A perfect empire, soaked in blood.”

“What is blood?” Praisegod said easily. “If men stand against us, they will be as stubble before our swords. And as for the rest, to spill the blood of an animal is not a sin, Malenfant. Indeed, given that these soulless apes show a mockery of man’s features, I am convinced that to cleanse the worlds of their obscene forms is a duty.”

“So you will use the Hams and the Runners as a resource to build your empire on this Moon. And when the hominids” usefulness has passed, you will exterminate them.”

Praisegod’s predator’s eyes gleamed. “It is time for your answer, Malenfant.”

Malenfant closed his eyes.

Stay alive, Malenfant. That’s all that matters. The creatures on this Red Moon mean nothing to you. A little while ago you didn’t even know they existed. (But some of them have helped me, even saved my life…) And they are not even human. (But they are differently human…) This Praisegod may be difficult, but he is powerful. If you can work with him he may even help you achieve your goal which is, was and always will be to find Emma. (But he’s a psychopathic monster…)

He imagined he heard Emma’s mocking voice.

You can’t do it, can you? You never were too good at politics, were you, Malenfant? — even in NASA — any place where the ancient primate strategies of knowing when to fight and when to groom, when to dominate and when to submit, were essential. Ah, but this is about more than politics, isn’t it, Malenfant? Are you growing a conscience? You, who lied his way to Washington and back to get his BDB off the ground, who used up people and spat them out on the way to achieving what you wanted? Now you stand here on this jungle Moon and you can’t swallow a few preachy platitudes to save your own worthless hide?…

Or, he thought, maybe McCann was right about me. So was my mother-in-law, come to that. Maybe all I ever wanted to do was crash and burn.

Praisegod’s foot was tapping out its nervous drumbeat. The Ham boy, seeming to sense the tension between the two men, slid off the desk and crawled behind Praisegod’s chair.

Malenfant took a breath. He said, “Why are you really so dead set against the hominids?” He glanced at the Neandertal boy; one eye and a thatch of ragged dark hair protruded from behind the chair leg. “Does this boy warm your bed, Praisegod Michael? Is that why you have to destroy him?”

Malenfant saw white all the way around Praisegod’s pupils, and a dribble of blood and snot was leaking from his nose. The man stood before Malenfant, close enough to smell the fishy stink of his breath. He whispered, “This time the whips will fillet the flesh off you, until the men will be flogging your neck and the soles of your feet. And I, I will prevail, in the light of His countenance.”

Malenfant had time for an instant of satisfaction. Got through to you, you bastard. Then he was clubbed to his knees.

Emma Stoney:

She spent days in the cliff-top forest, spying, scouting.

This patch of forest was damp and thin. There were extensive clearings where old trees had fallen to the ground in chaotic tangles of branches. Paths wound among the trees, marked out through rotting leaves, fungus-ridden trunks, brambles and crushed saplings. Many of these paths were made no doubt by animals, or perhaps hominids, the Nutcracker-folk or the Elf-folk. But some of them were, unmistakably, the work of humans; straight, sometimes rutted by wheels.

And the human paths converged on a township, a brooding, massive structure at the heart of the forest. It was the fortress of the Zealots.

The great gate of the compound would open a couple of times a day to let out or admit parties, apparently for hunting and provisioning. The open gates, swinging on massive hinges of rope, revealed a shabby cluster of huts and fire-pits within. The Zealot foragers, always men, always dressed in drab green-stained skins, were armed with pikes and bows and arrows. They stayed alert as they made their way along the paths they had worn between the trees.

The returning parties would call out informal halloos to let those inside know they wanted in. Nobody seemed to feel the need for passwords or other identifiers. But the gate openings were brief, and the forest beyond was always carefully watched by armed men. The foragers would return with sacks full of the forest’s fruits, or with bats or animals, commonly small hogs, or even grain and root vegetables brought in from the hinterland that must stretch beyond the forest.

But they would also bring home Elves, even the occasional Nutcracker, suspended limply from poles, heads lolling. The Zealots had no taboo, it seemed, over consuming the flesh of their apparent near-relatives — which she heard them call, in their thick, strangulated accent, bush meat. The hunters seemed to prize the hands and ears of infant Elves, which they would hack off and wear around their necks as gruesome trophies.

Also, less frequently, they brought home captured Runners. The Runners were always returned alive. The men and boys were evidently beaten into submission, their backs bearing the scars of whips and their faces misshapen from blows; they trudged through the forests with ropes around their necks and wrists, and with their long legs hobbled so they had to shuffle. She supposed the male Runners were brought back to the stockade as slave labour. Their strong, supple bodies and clever hands well qualified them for the role.

Perhaps some of the captured women and girls were used that way too, but Emma suspected they had a darker fate in store. They were returned to the township with bite marks and scratches on their breasts and blood running down their legs. Some of the boys seemed to have been similarly abused. Evidently the hunters took the breaking-in of a new captive as a perk of the job. Emma had no way of knowing how many of these victims had fought too hard, and ended their lives in the forest in uncomprehending misery beneath the grunting bodies of the Zealots.

She was relieved her instinct had always been to keep out of sight of these people. She didn’t quite know what reaction they would have to finding a human woman alone in the forest, but she didn’t feel inclined to take a chance on their charity.

At last her spying paid off. She overheard a group of hunters, as they lazed in the shade of a fig tree, feeding themselves on its plump fruit and talking loosely. Their gossip was of a major expedition — it almost sounded military to take on a new group the Zealots called the Daemons. The Zealots sounded alternately apprehensive and excited about the coming conflict; there was much speculation about the quality of the women among the Daemons.

Emma knew nothing about these Daemons, and couldn’t care less. But if a large number of the township’s able bodies was going to be taken away, she sensed a window of opportunity.

She sat in the cave before Joshua, holding his massive head with both her hands on his filthy cheeks, making him face her. “Hunting Praisegod Michael. Tomorrow. Hunting Praisegod. Do you understand?”

“Hunt Prai’go’,” he said at last, thickly, his damaged tongue protruding. “Tomorr’.”

“Yes. Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. All right?”

He gazed back at her, his eyes containing an eerie sharpness that none of his people seemed to share. Perhaps there was madness there — but even so, it was a much more human gaze than any she had encountered since losing Sally and Maxie. But there was absolutely no guile in those eyes, none at all, and no element of calculation or planning.

She released him.

He picked up a rock he had been knapping, and resumed working on it, steady, patient. She sat down in the corner of the cave, her legs drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, watching him. The blue-grey glow of the sky, leaching of light, reflected in his eyes as he worked; often, like most Ham knappers, he didn’t even look at the stone he was working.

Tomorrow, this child-man would have to take part in a concerted assault.

Not for the first time Emma wondered what the hell she was doing here. How have I come so far? I’m an accountant, for God’s sake…

She had spent the days waiting for the Zealots” expedition trying to raise a fighting force from among the Hams. But she had quickly learned that it was impossible to turn these huge, powerful, oddly gentle creatures into anything resembling soldiers — not in a short time, probably not if she kept at it for ever. She had hit at last on the notion of making the assault a hunt, the one activity where the Hams did appear to show something resembling guile.

But even now she didn’t know how many of them she could count on. She, and Joshua, had managed to enthuse a few of the younger men to join the battle. But when she approached them the next day even the most ardent would-be warriors would have forgotten all about the project.

Another problem was that the Hams” only notion of actual combat was hand-to hand: just yesterday she had seen three of the men wrestle an overgrown buck antelope to the ground with their bare hands. It was a strategy that had worked for them so far, evidently, or the cold hand of natural selection would long ago have eliminated them — even if they paid the price in severe injuries and shortened lifespans. But it wasn’t a strategy that would work well in a war, even against the disorganized and weakened rabble she hoped the Zealots would prove to be.

In the end, she realized, the Hams would fight (or not) according to their instinct and impulse, and they would fight the way they always had, come what may. She would just have to accept that, and deal with the consequences.

Joshua turned the rock over in his hands, running his scarred fingertips over the planes he had exposed, gazing intently at it. Unlike her, he wasn’t fretting about tomorrow. She sensed a stillness about his mind, as if it were a clear pool, clear right to the bottom, and in its depths all she could see was the rock. It was as if Joshua and the rock blurred together, becoming a single entity, as if his self-awareness were dimming, as if he were more aware of the microstructure of the rock even than of himself.

With her head echoing as ever with hopes and fears and schemes, Emma couldn’t begin to imagine how that might feel. But she knew she envied him. Since starting to live with the Hams she had often wished she could simply switch off the clamour in her head, the way they seemed to.

Now Joshua lifted his worn bone hammer — the only possession he cherished — and, with the precision of a surgeon, tapped the rock. A flake fell away. It was a scraper, she saw, an almost perfect oval.

He lifted his head and grinned at her, his scarred tongue protruding.

The Zealots” attacking army had drawn up in rough order outside the stockade, armed with their crossbows and knives and pikes. There looked to be fifty men and boys, and they had been followed by about as many Runner bearers, all of them limping, their arms full of bundles of weapons and provisions.

Emma watched the soldiers prepare, curious. The pikemen, in addition to their immensely long pikes, had leather armour: breastplates and backplates, what they called gorgets to protect their throats, and helmets that they called pots. They carried provisions in leather packs they called snapsacks. There was even a cavalry, of sorts; but the soldiers rode the shoulders of men, of Runners. They were marshalled by an insane-looking cleric type, in a long robe of charcoal blackened skin — and by a hominid, a vast, hulking gorilla-like creature with rapid, jerky movements and swivelling ears. Was it a Daemon? At least eight feet tall, it looked smart, purposeful; Emma hadn’t seen its like before.

Not your problem, Emma.

The army, its preparations nearly done, sang hymns and psalms. Then a man they called Constable Sprigge stood on a rock before them, and began to pray. “Lord, you know how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me…” Emma found the wry soldiers” prayer oddly moving.

And with that the army marched off through the forest. The Zealot fortress was as weakened as it would ever be.

She crouched by the stockade gate, her heart beating like a hammer drill, clutching the shortest, sharpest thrusting spear she could find. She surveyed her own motley army. In the end, only the big man, Abel — Joshua’s brother — and the oddly adventurous girl Mary had elected to join her and Joshua on this expedition. Three Hams counted physically for a lot more than twice as many Zealots. And she was planning nothing more than a smash-and-grab raid, a commando operation, a mission with a single goal. But still, there were only four of them — three child-people and herself, and she was certainly no soldier.

She was frightened for the Hams, already guilty for the harm they would surely suffer today — and, of course, profoundly frightened for herself, middle-aged accountant turned soldier. But this was the only way she could see to get to Malenfant. And getting to him was the only way she was ever going to get out of this dismal, bizarre place — if he really was here, if he was still alive, if she hadn’t somehow misunderstood Joshua, fooled by his damaged tongue and her own aching heart. And so she put aside her fears and doubts and guilt, for there was no choice.

She kept her Hams quiet until she was sure the ragged Zealot army was out of hearing.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

The compound was calm, quiet, orderly. Workers trundled to and fro over the bright yellow floor of Adjusted Space, pursuing their unending chores.

But not a person moved. They stood or sat or lay in a variety of poses, like statues, or corpses, arrayed beneath the huge turning Map of the world. The core activity here was internal, as each person contemplated the vast conundrum of the Red Moon.

After two million years of continuous civilization, nobody rushed.

But to Manekato, after her vivid experiences in the forest, it was like being in a mausoleum. She found a place of shade and threw herself to the ground. A Worker came over and offered her therapeutic grooming, but Manekato waved it away.

Nemoto came to her. She carried her block of paper, much scribbled-on. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and regarded Manekato gravely. “Renemenagota of Rano represents a great danger.”

Manekato snapped her teeth angrily. “What do you know of the hearts of people? You are not even a person. You are like a Worker…”

But Nemoto showed no distress. “Person or not, I may perceive certain truths more clearly than you. I see, for instance, that you are troubled on a deep level. You are human, but you are still animal too, Manekato. And your animal side is repelled by the cold efficiency of this place you have built, and is drawn to the dark mysteries of the forest. Perhaps my lesser kind have a better understanding of the shadows of our hearts.” But there was defiance in her pronunciation of that word lesser.

Manekato felt shamed. Hadn’t she just taken out her own distress and confusion on a weaker creature — this Nemoto — just as Without-Name had punished the hominids she had captured? She propped herself up on her elbows. “What is it you want?”

“I have a hypothesis,” said the little hominid.

Manekato sighed. More of Nemoto’s theories: partial, immature, expressed badly and at the pace of a creeping glacier — and yet suffused by an earnest need to be understood, listened to, approved. She nodded, a gesture she had learned from Nemoto herself.

Nemoto began to spread pages of her paper block over the floor. The paper bore columns labelled Earth, Banded Earth, Grey Earth (Hams), and so on, though some columns were headed by nothing but query marks. And the paper was covered with a tangle of lines and arrows that linked the columns one to the other.

“I have elaborated my views,” Nemoto said. “I have come to believe that this Red Moon has played a key role in human evolution. Consider. How do new species arise, of hominids or any organism? Isolation is the key. If mutations arise in a large and freely mixing population, any new characteristic is diluted and will disappear within a few generations. But when a segment of the population becomes isolated from the rest, dilution through interbreeding is prevented. Then, when a new characteristic appears within the group — and provided it is beneficial to the survival of the group and the individuals within it — it will be reinforced. Thus the isolated group may, quite rapidly, diverge from the base population.

“And when those barriers to isolation are removed, the new species finds itself in competition with its predecessors. If it is better adapted to the prevailing conditions, it will survive by out-competing the parent stock. If not, it declines.

“When our scientists believed there was only one Earth, they suspected the evolution of humanity had been the consequence of a number of speciation steps. The ape-like bipedal Australopithecines gave rise to tool users, who in turn produced erect hairless creatures capable of walking on the open plain, who in turn gave rise to various species of Homo sapiens — the family that includes myself. It is believed that at some points in history there were many hominid species, all derived from the base Australopithecine stock, living together on the Earth. But my kind — Homo sapiens sapiens — proved the fittest of them all. By out-competition, the variant species were removed.

“Presumably, each speciation episode was instigated by the isolation of a group of the parent stock. We had generally assumed that the key isolating events were caused by climate changes: rising or falling sea levels, the birth or death of forests, the coming and going of glaciation. It was a plausible picture. Before we knew of the Red Moon.”

“And now your radical hypothesis—”

Nemoto tapped her papers. “What if the vagaries of the Red Moon were involved, in all this? Look here. This central column sketches the history of the Earth.”

“Your Earth.”

Nemoto smiled, her small naked face pinched. “Assume that the base Australopithecine stock evolved on Earth. Imagine that the Red Moon with its blue Wheel portals scooped up handfuls of undifferentiated Australopithecines and, perhaps some generations later, deposited them on a variety of subtly different Earths.”

“It is hard to imagine a more complete isolation.”

“Yes. And the environments in which they were placed might have had no resemblance to those from which they were taken. In that case our Australopithecines would have had to adapt or die. Perhaps one group was stranded on a world of savannah and open desert—”

“Ah. You are suggesting that the hairless, long-legged Runners might have evolved on such a world.”

“Homo erectus — yes. Other worlds produced different results. And later, the Red Moon returned and swept up samples of those new populations, and handed them on to other Earths — or perhaps returned them where they had come from, to compete with the parent stock, successfully or otherwise.

“My species shares a comparatively recent common ancestor with creatures like the Hams — which are of the type we call Neandertals, I think. Perhaps a group of that ancestral stock was taken to the world the Hams call the Grey World, where they evolved the robust form we see now. And, later, a sample of Hams was returned to the Earth. Later still, groups of Homo sapiens sapiens — that is, my kind — were swept here from the Earths of the groups called the English and the Zealots, and no doubt others.” She gazed at her diagrams. “Perhaps even my own kind evolved on some other Earth, and were brought back by the Moon in some ancient accident.”

Manekato picked her nose thoughtfully. “Very well. And my Earth — which you have labelled ‘Banded Earth’ ?”

Somewhat hesitantly, Nemoto said, “It seems that your Earth may have been seeded by Australopithecine stock from my Earth. You seem to have much in common, morphologically, with the robust variant of Australopithecines to be seen in the forests here, called Nutcrackers.”

Manekato lay back and sighed, her mind racing pleasurably. “You fear you have offended me by delegating my world to a mere off-shoot. You have not. And your scheme is consistent with the somewhat mysterious appearance of my forebears on Earth — my Earth.” She glanced at Nemoto’s sketches. “It is a promising suggestion. This strange Moon might prove to be the crucible of our evolution; certainly it is unlikely that hominid forms could not have evolved independently on so many diverse Earths. But such is the depth of time involved, and such is the complexity of the mixing achieved by our wandering Moon, the full picture is surely more complicated than your sketch — and it is hard to believe that your Earth just happens to be the primary home of the lineage… And how is it that so many of these other Earths share, not just hominid cousins, but a shared history, even shared languages? Your own divergence from the Zealot type must be quite ancient — their peculiar tails attest to that — and yet your history evidently shares much in common with them.”

Nemoto frowned, her small face comically serious. “That is a difficulty. Perhaps there is such a thing as historical convergence. Or perhaps the wandering of the Moon has induced mixing even in historical times. Cultural, linguistic transmission—”

It was a simplistic suggestion, but Manekato did not want to discourage her. “Perhaps. But the truth may be more subtle. Perhaps the manifold of universes is larger than you suppose. If it were arbitrarily large, then there would be an arbitrarily close match to any given universe.”

Nemoto puzzled through that. “Just as I would find my identical twin, in a large enough population of people.”

“That’s the idea. The closer the match you seek, the more unlikely it would be, and the larger the population of, umm, candidate twins you would need to search.”

“But the degree of convergence between, say, the Zealot universe and my own language, culture, even historical figures — is so unlikely that the manifold of possibilities would have to be very large indeed.”

“Infinite,” said Mane gently. “We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wander is in fact infinite.”

Nemoto considered that for a while. Then she said, “But no matter how large the manifold, I still have to understand why this apparatus of a reality-wandering Moon should have been devised in the first place — and who by.”

Manekato studied Nemoto, wishing she could read the hominid’s small face better. “Why show me your schema now?”

“Because,” Nemoto said, “I believe all of this, this grand evolutionary saga, is now under threat.”

Manekato frowned. “Because of the failure of the world engines?”

“No,” Nemoto said. “Because of you. And Renemenagota of Rano.”

A shadow fell over Manekato’s face. “Your ape may be right, Mane. You should listen to it.”

It was Without-Name. She stepped forward, carelessly scattering Nemoto’s spidery diagrams.

Emma Stoney:

Emma lifted her head. “Hall-oo! Hall-oo!” Her call, though pitched higher than that of the men who mostly ventured outside the stockade, was, she was sure, a pretty accurate imitation of the soft cries of returning hunters.

Within a couple of minutes she heard an answering grunt, and the rattle of heavy wooden bolts being slid back.

All or nothing, she thought. Malenfant — or death.

When the heavy gate started to creak open, she yelled and threw herself at it. Her flimsy mass made no difference. But the Hams immediately copied her, making a sound like a car ramming a tree. The splintering gate was smashed back, and she heard a howl of pain.

The Hams surged forward. There were people in the compound, women and children. As three immense Hams came roaring in amongst them, they ran screaming.

Emma glanced around quickly. She saw a litter of crude adobe huts, that one substantial chapel-like building at the centre, a floor of dust stamped flat by feet and stained with dung and waste. She smelled shit, stale piss.

Now the door to one of the buildings flew open. Men boiled out, pulling on clothing. Inside the building’s smoky darkness Emma glimpsed naked Runner women, some of them wearing mockeries of dresses, others on beds and tables, on their backs or their bellies, legs splayed, scarred ankles strapped down.

Grabbing pikes and clubs and bows, the men ran at Abel, howling. With a cry of pleasure Abel joined with them. He brushed aside their clubs as if they were twigs wielded by children. He got two of the Zealots by the neck, lifted them clean off the ground, and slammed their heads together, making a sound like eggs cracking.

But now the bowmen had raised their weapons and let fly. Emma, despising herself, huddled behind Abel’s broad back. She heard the grisly impact of arrows in Abel’s chest. He fell to his knees, and blood spewed from his mouth.

The archers were struggling to reload. Mary hurled herself at them, fists flailing.

Emma grabbed Joshua’s arm. “Malenfant! Quickly, Joshua. Malenfant — where?”

For answer he ran towards the chapel-like central building. Emma touched Abel’s back apologetically, and ran after Joshua towards the chapel. She seethed with rage and adrenaline and fear. This had better be worth the price we’re paying, Malenfant.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Manekato stood quickly. Nemoto hurried behind her, sheltering behind her bulk. Babo came running to join them, his legs and arms levering him rapidly over the floor of Adjusted Space. Other people gathered in a loose circle around this central confrontation, watching nervously. Workers scuttled back and forth, seeking tasks, trying to discern the needs of the people, ignored.

For the first time it struck Manekato just how physically big Without-Name was towering over a lesser hominid like Nemoto, but larger than Manekato too, larger than any of the other people on this expedition. Physical size did not matter at home, on civilized Earth. But on this savage Moon, strength and brute cunning were key survival factors; and Without-Name seemed to relish her unrestrained power.

And now Manekato noticed a new hominid following in Without-Name’s wake. It was a male, taller than Nemoto, rake-thin, and he was dressed in a tight robe of animal skin stained black, perhaps by charcoal. He drew a Ham boy after him. The boy was dressed in elaborate clothing, and he had a collar around his neck, connected to a lead in the tall hominid’s hand.

Babo said tightly, “And is this your Praisegod Michael, Renemenagota of Rano?”

Without-Name raised one hand.

Crossbow bolts thudded into Babo’s belly and chest and upper arms. He cried out softly, dull surprise on his face. He crumpled forward and fell on the bolts, making them twist, and his cries deepened. A Worker rushed to tend Babo’s wounds, but Without-Name kicked it away.

Manekato, stunned, saw that the circular platform was surrounded by hominids Zealots, in their sewn skins. Some of them, bizarrely, were riding on the shoulders of Running-folk. They seemed afraid, but they held up their crossbows and spears with defiance.

Praisegod Michael passed his hands over Babo’s shuddering form, making a cross in the air. “Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man…”

Manekato found words. “Renemenagota — what are you doing?”

“Providing you with a purpose.”

“Your army of hominids would be no match for the power we could deploy,” Manekato whispered.

“Of course not — if you choose to deploy it,” Without-Name said mockingly. “But you won’t, will you? Meanwhile these hominids believe they are soldiers of God. They have only their simple handmade weapons, but their heads are on fire. And so their crossbow bolts will best all your learning and technology. And under my guidance, they will sweep the world.”

Now Nemoto stepped out from behind Manekato. Without-Name eyed the little hominid with undisguised loathing.

But Praisegod Michael faced her, apparently unsurprised to find her here. “You are the one called Nemoto. Malenfant told me I would find you here.”

“I know your kind,” Nemoto said. She turned to Manekato. “You must stop this, here and now. You have not seen such things before, Manekato. With Renemenagota’s organizational skill, Michael and his fellows will march on, overwhelming others with their savagery and determination, armed with an unwavering faith that will lead them to their deaths if necessary. Those they do not destroy will be forcibly converted to the creed. By the second generation the conquered will regard themselves as soldiers of the conquering army. We are limited creatures, Manekato, and we do not have the strength of mind to fight off a contagion of seductive but lethal ideas. You must stop this for the slaughter that will follow if you don’t.”

Babo twisted on the ground, his hands clamped to his stomach, his face a rictus of pain. “Yes,” he hissed. “Exponential growth, Mane. They will conquer, acquire resources to fuel further expansion, thus acquiring still more, and all driven by a dazzling-virus of the mind.”

Manekato said, “It is — unbelievable.” Nemoto faced her. “Manekato, you must save us from ourselves — and save this machine-world from the deadly manipulation of Renemenagota.”

Without-Name stood before her, her immense biceps bunched, gazing into her eyes, so close Manekato could smell blood on her breath. “Perhaps this ape-thing is right, Manekato. Will you take its advice? — Ah, but then you would have to become like me, wouldn’t you, and how you dread that! You must destroy me — but you cannot, can you, Mane?”

Babo, on the floor, groaned and raised one bloody arm. “But I can, Renemenagota of Rano.”

A sudden wind, hot and dense, billowed before Manekato’s face.

People staggered back, crying out. Nemoto took hold of Babo’s arm, anchoring herself against the gusts.

A tube of whirling air formed over the platform. It was the end of a winding column that stretched down from the sky, silvery-grey, suddenly tightly defined. It was a controlled whirlwind, like that which had stormed around the Market for two hundred thousand years.

And in the heart of the column of tortured air was Renemenagota. She raised her fists, briefly bipedal like those whom she had sought to lead. But she could land no blows on the twisting air, and it paid no heed to her screamed defiance.

In a brief blur of brown and black, she was gone.

The whirlwind shrivelled, shrinking back up into the lid of cloud that had covered the sky. A cloud of crimson dust came drifting down on the platform.

Mane, stunned, bewildered, looked around. Nemoto still clung to the fallen Babo. Of the ring of armed Zealots there was no sign.

Praisegod had been bowled over. He lay on his back on the platform, his black clothing scattered around him. His eyes flickered, cunning, calculating, the eyes of a trapped animal seeking a way out.

But his pet Ham boy stood over him.

Praisegod lifted his hand to the boy, asking for help, forcing a smile.

The boy bunched his fist and rammed it into Praisegod’s chest, through clothing, skin, an arch of ribs.

Praisegod shuddered and flopped like a landed fish. The Ham’s squat — face was expressionless as he rummaged in that bloody cavern. Then the Ham boy grimaced, and the muscles of his arms contracted.

Praisegod’s head arched back, and his voice was a rasp. “Why have you forsaken me?…”

Then, his heart crushed, he was still.

Emma Stoney:

There was a lot of shouting going on. Mary was running around the compound, busily engaging her foe. Though Abel had fallen, Mary was moving too quickly for the archers to get an accurate sight on her, and every time she got close enough she was slamming heads, breaking arms and generally kicking ass with a joyous vigour.

The chapel, built of mud brick around a sturdy wooden frame, was as substantial as it looked. Emma ducked into the building and slammed the door, and ran a heavy wooden bolt into a notch.

Within seconds fists were hammering on the door.

“Quickly,” she said to Joshua. “Malenfant. Where?”

But Joshua did not reply, and when she turned, she saw that he was facing a crucifix, gazing at the gentle, anguished face of a Messiah. Joshua cringed, but was unable to look away.

The yelling at the door was growing intense, and the first hints of organized battering were detectable. Emma couldn’t wait any longer. She cast around the little chapel, shoving aside furniture and a small, ornately carved wooden altar.

And she found a hatchway.

The hatch opened on a small, dark shaft, fitted with stubby wooden rungs. Emma clambered down hastily, to find herself in a short corridor. A single wicker torch burned fitfully in a holder. She grabbed it and hurried along the corridor.

The corridor led to two wooden doors. One door was swinging open, and Emma recoiled. The cell within was just a pit, with a filth-crusted floor and blackened, scratched walls; it stank of blood and vomit and urine.

The other door was shut. Emma hammered on it. “Malenfant! Are you there?” The wood was so filthy her hands came away smeared with deep black.

No reply.

Struggling to hold up the torch, she made out a thick bolt, just wood, a smaller copy of the one on the compound gate. She hesitated for a heartbeat, her hand on the bolt.

She reminded herself that she actually had no idea what lay on the other side of this door. But you’ve come this far, Emma.

She pulled back the bolt, dragged open the door. She held the torch in front of her protectively.

There were two people here. One was sitting on the floor, hands crossed over her chest for protection — her, for it was a woman, in a long dress that looked finely made. But despite the dress and the tied-back hair, that protruding face and the ridged eyes marked her out as a Ham.

The other was a man. He was wearing a blue coverall, and he was curled up in the dirt, folded on himself.

Emma hurried to him. Gently she lifted aside his arm, to reveal his face. “Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant…”

He opened his eyes, and his face worked. “Welcome to hell,” he whispered.

The Ham woman slipped her arms under Malenfant and cradled him, with remarkable tenderness. She said her name was Julia; her English, though slurred by the deficiencies of the Ham palate, was well-modulated and clear.

With Malenfant limp but seemingly light as a baby in Julia’s arms, they clambered out of the pit and back into the chapel.

Still the Zealots battered at the door. Joshua remained in his apelike crouch, his head buried in his big arms. He was whimpering, as if horrified by what he had done.

Gently Emma pulled his arm away from his face. His cheeks were smeared with tears. “No time,” she said. “Mary. Skinnies hurt Mary. Joshua help.”

It took an agonizing minute of repetition, with the hammering on the door turning into a splintering, before he responded.

He got to his feet with a roar. He ran to the door, dragged it open, and with a sweep of his massive arm he knocked aside the scrambling crowd of Zealot men. He forced his way outside, calling for Mary.

Julia followed, carrying Malenfant. Emma stayed close by her side, cradling Malenfant’s lolling head.